How (and why) to create a Slack community or dedicated Slack Channels for your customers
Business is in the middle of a paradigm shift in communication. Over the past few years, Slack has become the dominant communication platform for employee-to-employee communication for a large portion of the high growth technology companies in the world. Slack has over 8M daily active users, and 77% of the Fortune 100 uses Slack in some capacity.
The next category of communication primarily done via email that is shifting into Slack is company-to-customer communication. Thousands of companies are communicating with customers directly in Slack, allowing for high-touch beta testing, onboarding, support, and ongoing customer success.
There are several different ways to communicate with customers via Slack. Shared channels, single channel guests, and stand-alone Slack communities. You can read about shared channels and single channel guests in our post about how we’ve managed to get 0% churn. Here, we will focus on the steps to create a standalone Slack community.
Companies such as Polymail, Keen.io, and Clearbit have done this with extraordinary success. Standuply created a great list of 1000+ Slack communities, many of which are focused on customer interaction. The number of communities has grown by 250% in the past year. We created our own community at Halp so we could eat our own cooking by building stronger relationships with customers while syncing important issues with tickets.
Why Slack customer communities?
Slack communities work especially well for B2B and developer-focused companies. Since the employees of most companies are already in Slack, communication becomes much easier and more high touch than email. Customers are more likely to engage with the company by reporting bugs, requesting features, or asking about pricing and upgrades. Developers will also often answer each other’s questions, reducing the customer support burden for the company. Recently, there have also been more examples of B2C companies successfully engaging customers via Slack to beta test their product or create exclusive communities of power users.
At Halp We became fascinated with this change in communication and the resulting shift in how all companies need to think about customer interactions. Over the last few months, we’ve joined hundreds of communities and talked to the companies that manage them to understand the good, the bad, and the ugly of Slack communities. We’re now very confident that we are in the middle of an important transformation towards message based customer interaction, and because of that, the tools companies use for customer support and success need to be reimagined.
Through these interactions, we’ve also developed a set of best practices for companies who want to create customer-focused Slack communities. This guide will help ensure companies are set up for success when creating and managing their own Slack community for customers.
Step 1: Create a Slack team
The first step is simple. Just go to Slack.com and signup for a new team — it’s best to have a standalone Slack team for your customers.
First, you have to create your own new Slack account. I recommend creating a username that includes your first name and company name so that people will know you are officially associated with the company. The team URL should be companyname-community.slack.com, or something similar. The name of the Slack team should be specific to the main use case for it. Ours is called BubbleIQ Beta Demo, because it allows potential customers and current customers to demo the product. Other common names I’ve seen include “COMPANY Support” and “COMPANY Community.”
Next up, you should invite your coworkers into the Slack team. Leave the box that says “let people sign up with their verified email address” checked so that new employees (or anyone you forget) can join the community easily.
Boom! Your basic Slack community is set up. Make sure you download the Slack native app for your computer and your phone so you don’t miss any messages.
Step 2: Modifying channels and settings
To keep things organized, it’s important to create a couple more channels. Every Slack team has a #general and a #random channel by default. Some companies rename general to their company name or #community. It’s a good idea to add two new public channels, #bug-reports and #feature-requests. Add these channels and give them appropriate “purposes” to encourage people to utilize them correctly.
Now, go into Team Settings to modify the channels people automatically join and what people are allowed to say. Click the carrot at the top left of Slack and click on “Team Settings.”
There’s a bunch of small tweaks that will make a big difference:
Set default channels that new users join. Remove #random and add #bug-reports & #feature-requests.
SUPER IMPORTANT! Make sure you disable the ability for users to see team member’s email addresses. There have been phishing attacks on Slack communities recently.
Add custom user guidelines that encourages customers to include their last name and company name.
Set your do not disturb times to match the hours you typically offer customer support.
Set a team icon
In the permissions tab, make sure that only admins & owners can use @channel, @here, and @everyone to mass-notify people in the community.
Depending on how open your community is, you may want to limit users from inviting others.
Change channel management so team owners and admins are the only ones who can create public channels and archive them. You may also want to limit other users from creating private channels.
Step 3: Setup your invite system
Almost there! The Slack community is setup, but people need a way to join it. Manually inviting customers into Slack is not ideal.
Luckily, there are a couple of great open source tools to createa a public page that allows customers to join your Slack community:
Slackin & Slack Invite Automation have a super simple 1 click heroku install. The best practice is to create a new user that is an admin and generate the token through that user (you can skip that if you’re lazy and just use your account). Go to the old Slack token page to generate a token to auth with your new user. You’ll also need to generate Google Recaptcha tokens here if you want to prevent spam accounts from joining.
We also highly recommend creating a Code of Conduct that users agree to when they join your community. Keen.io has a great open source Code of Conduct that you can base yours off of, and Slackin has a check box that users agree to when they join.
Boom! That should deploy to Heroku and you will be up and running. If you don’t want to pay the $7/mo to keep the Heroku from sleeping, just add a little file called ping.js in the main directory that looks like this:
Then add the free heroku scheduler plugin and set it to run node ping.js every 10 minutes.
The final step is to add a link to Slackin invite page from your website, often in the support section as a link with to “Chat with us” or just in the footer with a little logo:
You’re up and running! Send some personal invites to a few important customers and start to integrate it into the customer onboarding experience.
(Optional) Step 4: Make it fun
If you want to make your community a little bit more fun, adding custom emojis is a great way to encourage engagement:
Add an emoji for your team logo, and maybe a couple other fun ones (you can even do gifs!). Then, set your status to be your company logo, which is a nice touch:
Got any other cool tricks or tips? Great Slack apps you love? Let us know what’s working well in your Slack community.
