Cut your emails in half: a quick win

Recently I’ve stumbled upon this question in a few different places:
What’s a good platform to manage internal communications?

To answer this question, let’s take one step back and answer this first:
What makes a tool good for internal communications?

To me, a tool is good when it doesn’t get in the way of your workflow, but lets you find new ways to make shortcuts and save time.

The team at pr.co — the startup I work with — is small, but we need to talk to each other a lot. A few months ago, the flow of our internal emails was continuous, and I don’t need to explain how dangerous it is to be a slave to your own inbox.

This all changed when we started using Slack, for a few different reasons.

What’s really useful in Slack?

Slack has become a real game-changer for internal communications — and not only for that. It started as a chat room, like many others. You get all the regular stuff: mobile and desktop apps, privacy options, notifications, direct messages, etc. but the real value is somewhere else:

1. Alternative to internal emails

Be less busy was Slack’s slogan when I met it for the first time, and I believe it’s true. In my experience, to be able to kill internal emails for good is the core value of Slack.

Instead of sending emails to a colleague, you can chat in a private channel. Instead of sending emails to a group of colleagues, you can open topic-based channels and use them to discuss. You can attach documents, add links, mention people, react with emojis, and so on. We have specific channels for support, for tech issues, for mentions, and so on.

So far, this could look like a good chat software. There’s more.

2. Integration with other services

For us, the a-ah moment came when we realised how many integrations we could add with ease. Technical services that warn us when our platform has an issue. Project management tools that warn us when a deadline is approaching. Silly bots that make you laugh.

Moreover, it’s easy to create custom Slack commands to add your own integrations. For further info: Slack commands, Community-built integrations, a guide to do anything in Slack.

Slack became a hub for both communications AND notifications. That’s why you save time.

As a plus, it’s also awesome.

3. User experience

This is a bit of a slippery slope — you can have so much fun with Slack, that it turns into a time killer rather than the time saver we were hoping for.

It’s up to you: would you like to create custom emojis with your colleagues’ faces and teach your favourite bot to send you pictures of pugs? Piece of cake!

What else we use

Among all the integrations we have in place, these are the ones I check more often:

Intercom

Each SaaS needs to be in touch with its users and clients. We chose Intercom because it integrates helpdesk, automated emails and chat in the same tool. We were able to drop 3 services when we started using Intercom — that’s a different topic though.

Trello

As a project management tool, I have to admit Trello is a bit limited. Its very own strength, the extreme simplicity, can turn into a limit as the amount of work increases. For a core team of 6, on the other hand, it’s pretty good. We’re currently testing Sprintly to see if it fits our needs better.

Github, Circle CI, Sentry, New Relic

Among all the technical services we use, these are the ones our dev team implemented in a separated channel on Slack — could be a topic for a future post.

Pr.co

Pr.co is an online software kit that helps communication professionals connect their daily tasks with their companies’ overall purpose. We’re using it to publish our company news, run email campaigns and manage our own public relations.

TL;DR

Stop sending emails to your colleagues. There are other ways.