Getting Data to Speak for Itself: 3 Slack Power-Ups Driving Outcomes at Axial
As tech professionals in 2021 we have more tools than ever to help us develop insights and excel in our roles. The abundance of options creates leverage, but also introduces risks in terms of overhead, inefficiency, and plain old underutilization.
That’s why at Axial we’ve made concentrated efforts to consolidate our key data reports and notifications into Slack. In this post, I’ll outline 3 different automated Slack alerts I’ve created using different tools to engage and inform the organization.
#1 — Pushmetrics
Pushmetrics lets you send visualizations from Tableau to Slack, in a fairly customizable fashion. You can set the cadence, whether to include downloadable attachments, custom messages to go along with the visuals, etc..
We use Pushmetrics to share regular readouts of Axial’s key performance metrics with the company. Figuring out the right cadence (often enough to create valuable visibility, but not so often that team members would tune them out) was an iterative process. Eventually we landed on weekly Friday readouts in our broader channels, and twice weekly readouts in our Product and Leadership channels.
These charts now often kick off valuable Slack conversations that would otherwise not be happening, leading to more ideas, accountability, and engagement across our teams.
#2 — Appcues + Zapier
We use Appcues to create targeted announcements and surveys via a no-code drag-and-drop interface that overlays on top of our desktop app. It allows us to reach our users in-app without the need to spend engineering resources. As some examples, we create modals announcing upcoming site maintenance, slide-out panels announcing new product releases, and surveys to collect user feedback.
In the case of surveys, the tough thing with Appcues is actually distilling and analyzing the data that’s collected. Previously, in order to access the user data related to any given “flow” created in Appcues, you needed to sign onto the platform, request a CSV export of user responses, wait for the CSV to arrive in your email inbox, then digest the sometimes confusing array of information in the CSV — much of which is recorded in IDs which you then need to cross-reference against your own application database.
Enter the Zapier integration. Appcues offers a number of super helpful integrations to better connect your Appcues data with other systems (Salesforce, Intercom, Zapier, etc.). We use Zapier because of its flexibility and ability to connect to multiple other systems at once. In this case, we set up a Zap so any time a user completes an Appcue survey on our platform, the critical data from the response (user email and the response itself) will be logged in a Google Sheet and also fire off a Slack alert in a dedicated channel. Something to the effect of:
The fact that each individual message reflects a positive response from a user creates a nice moment of serendipity for our team when we see a Slack alert for the #survey-response channel. From there, account managers will often post useful additional context about the user which kicks off cross-team collaboration in the channel.
#3 — Bubble
Bubble is a no-code application builder our Product team recently started using, mostly to build internal tools for our organization. Several months ago, in an effort to speed up the process of storing and sharing release notes, I decided to build an integrated release notes app in Bubble. Historically, every time we released new code, I’d need to run through a time consuming process of logging a release note in a Google Sheet, then pasting and reformatting the note for distribution in our #release-notes or #bug-fixes Slack channel.
Thankfully, Bubble offers built-in integration with Slack which can be used to trigger customized Slack messages based on actions within your Bubble application — in this case, saving a new release note in Bubble now triggers an auto-formatted message to the appropriate Slack channel depending on the release type. This turns a previously manual process into a single efficient motion.
Conclusion
The accessibility and presentation of data is critical to any organization’s ability to drive important business decisions. If your data is living in a silo and not being talked about, its value is severely diminished. We’ve found that surfacing data and insights in a forum designed for conversation is a powerful way to foster thoughtful internal discussion.
If you’ve got any ideas on Slack integrations, data presentation, or anything in between, I’d love to hear from you in the comments section.
