Salesforce starts Slack integrations with Slack-First Customer 360 with more on deck

Salesforce launched its first integrations with newly acquired Slack across its clouds and Customer 360. The effort is aimed at hybrid work and the "digital HQ" as well as resolving customer issues and closing sales faster.

Like its acquisitions of Tableau and MuleSoft, Slack is becoming a tool that's a standalone application as well as one woven throughout the Salesforce Stack.

Specifically, Salesforce is launching Slack-First Customer 360, which aims to allow enterprises to collaborate and streamline workflows with one view of the customer. Salesforce is also using Slack to automate routine business processes. The deal was officially announced on December 1, ending speculation the CRM giant was looking to expand its footprint more into collaboration and workflows.

IBM and Sonos are reference customers for this Slack-first approach and companies such as DocuSign, Gainsight and Vidyard will also have apps providing Slack as a front end to processes. Salesforce integrators Accenture, Deloitte and IBM will be among the partners certifying consultants on Slack-Salesforce deployments.

• 'Digital HQ' emerges from Salesforce's $27.7 billion Slack acquisition
• Slack wants to put an end to nonstop meetings and Zoom calls

Salesforce President and COO Bret Taylor and Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield will outline the integrations at an event at 1 pm ET. Rob Seaman, senior vice president, Slack@Salesforce, said using Slack as an engagement surface for Salesforce is about revamping workflows and processes for what it calls digital HQs. "This is about connecting humans as much as systems," said Seaman. "Traditionally people have been bogged down by multiple systems."

Among the key Salesforce and Slack integrations:

• Salesforce and Slack are launching account and deal rooms within Slack so sales teams can collaborate around a customer or deal cycle. Files, conversations and data will be in one place to close deals.
• Automated daily briefs within Slack will help sales reps focus on personalized tasks, meetings and priority deals.
• Within customer service, teams will be able to access case data instantly within Slack. Swarming is a feature that creates a Slack channel for service teams to work on complex and high priority cases and coordinate internal and external partner. Expert Finder finds experts to add to swarm channel. 
• On the marketing front, Salesforce and Slack will give marketing teams a shared space with AI-driven insights pulled from Marketing Cloud and Datorama. Workflow notifications will update Slack channels when changes are made to marketing collateral.
• For analytics, Salesforce is launching Slack-first analytics with Tableau integration. Tableau insights can be consumed inside Slack with automated notifications on sales pipelines and data shifts as well as daily updates on metrics and trends. Dashboard updates are provided within team channels.

Seaman added that the Slack integrations just rolled out are just the beginning and more clouds and industry platforms will also be rolled out with unique workflows.

As for the experience for existing Salesforce customers, the company has rolled out best practices of how to model workflows in Slack. Salesforce is also shipping Slack based apps to connect its clouds.

There may be some education ahead for the Slack and Salesforce integrations as well as building digital HQs, said Seaman. "Creating a digital HQ requires nurturing and feeding. There will be some change management, but we believe the benefits far outweigh the changes."

Slack-First Sales, Service and Marketing will be available in pilot in fall 2021 with Slack-First Analytics generally available in fall 2021. Intelligent and Collaborative Insights from Datorama available now.