If you are a Sales operation or CRM leader in Manufacturing worried about your support requests from Sales teams falling through the cracks, not able to respond to your opportunity technical requests in a timely fashion due to lack of collaboration, my post will help to address it. As part of a CRM team working with Manufacturers who manufacture complex technical products, here are the common challenges faced.

• Reduce the number of direct messages from Account Executives to CAEs and CSMs, which are extremely prone to falling through the cracks and being missed
• Quantify the number of internal support requests and track cases from creation to resolution.
• Help Customer Application Engineers and Customer Success Managers better prioritize
• Give Account Executives a simple and reliable way to request support on their opportunities
• Keep a single source of truth and increase visibility

So the question is how do we solve this problem if your sales team lives in CRM, the Support team lives in Slack and the collaboration has not reached the right folks at the right time? The solution is to integrate Slack with Salesforce and get all the collaboration in one place.

Provide visibility to sales and support in their preferred channel by integrating slack and Salesforce.

We are using a screen flow to create cases for internal engineering support on our customer projects. We then leverage a process builder to assign the case to the correct Customer Application Engineer or Customer Success Manager based on two factors: the case creator and case type. Within our tech stack, we are also leveraging a third-party tool called Rattle. Rattle allows us to send slack messages to case owners and then gives the case owner the ability to update things like status, estimated completion date/time, and add a resolution, without ever leaving Slack. 

Step 1 is to create a screen flow component that will allow the sales teams to create cases right on the opportunity screen with point and click compared to custom development. The screenshots below provide you guidance on it.

Step 2 – Configure Rattle to integrate Slack with Salesforce

Leveraging Rattle which is a cool app to integrate Slack with Salesforce, you can have slack messages created to your support team on a channel as soon as a case is created in Salesforce. You might ask why not leverage slack for Salesforce? Well, with Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack still going through the official approval, the standard app had limitations by not being dynamic and a complicated setup process!! Safe harbor !! 🙄😣This can be a roadmap item. With Rattle, you can create workflows that can do the following.

1. Create messages in a Specific slack channel as soon as a case is created in salesforce.
2. The support team can create tasks for sales teams in Slack to follow up with customers on questions and issues.
3. Support teams can create case comments directly from Slack and let the Sales team know about the latest status update.

Below are some screenshots which would help you to understand how Rattle workflow configuration works, how the support team can collaborate on the slack channel on the case and display it in Salesforce.

Step 3 – Enable your sales team to see all the slack messages right on the opportunity and case screen.

Once the integration is done, you can then display all the tasks and cases right in Salesforce on the opportunity and case detail screen. How about one step easier for your sales team? Instead of your sales team jumping on a screen to create a case, why not allow them to create a case right on the opportunity screen with minimal fields and get the support request resolved even quicker!! Would this not make your sales team jump with joy!! Look at the below screenshots that will help you do it.

By enabling the slack integration with Salesforce, we have seen our support requests move from 4 support requests a week to 260 requests a month. This has considerably reduced our opportunity close time significantly.

Here are 3 key takeaways which you can do right away by reading this blog post.

1. Ensure there is a clear mapping between sales and support teams and make sure the opportunity owners and case owners are configured right.
2. Use personal emails and test slack channels for testing.
3. Have a security policy in place to ensure sensitive data is not shared in Slack from Salesforce.

As always feel free to post your comments or email me at buyan@eigenx.com and I would be happy to answer questions.