Leveraging Slack for cross-platform customer support
At Current we are building the digital hub for your financial life. In a world where people expect their digital services to spill across websites, apps, and messaging services, we ensure that our customers are able to access Current on their platform of choice. Slack has been an early partner, and as we have grown, we have found Slack to be central in creating a new type of customer support experience across all platforms.
Slack launched Message Buttons today, and we’ve used this feature to enable the live support interaction shown above. There’s a lot going on in this gif so let’s break it down:
With Message Buttons, we can proactively offer live support on Slack if the user makes an error.
When that button is pressed a new channel on the Current Support Slack team is created, and all team members are invited to the channel. The whole Current team is a part of the Current Support Slack team, so anyone who’s available can answer new support requests.
A message with all relevant customer information is posted into this new channel, alerting all team members.
In order to increase speed to reply, we added a slash command to send a greeting. The greeting is formatted for the platform where the customer is seeking support (more on that later).
Within the @current DM on the customer’s Slack team, we add the profile name and profile image of the Current Support member who is handling the request. This information is derived from the Slack profiles of the team members of the Current Support Slack team. This means no hard coding of profile image URLs and names and makes onboarding new Support team members as easy as inviting them to the Current Support team and restarting the support process.
Both the customer and the Current support team member can end the support chat. When the chat is ended, the channel is archived on the Current Support team.
The transcript of the chat is then added to a new Zendesk ticket and posted to #general. At the close of the support chat, the customer is prompted to give binary feedback and that feedback is added as a reaction on the internal transcript message.
By creating the Zendesk ticket, we are able to follow up via email with the customer if any further action is required on our end, or if we need to reach out for more details.
One of the largest benefits of this support pattern is that it can be extended across customer platforms. Right now customers can reach out to us through our Slack integration, however, we are developing many other messenger integrations concurrently. Leveraging Slack’s infrastructure we can aggregate all messenger support requests into the Current Support Slack team.
Every platform we add handles the messages from the support team (a simple WebSocket server) in a way that can be displayed natively. On SMS, we create a channel with the customer’s phone number.
The /greet message becomes a simple text message where the support team member is introduced by name.
Slack has been an essential tool for us to bring these interactions to life. It’s dynamic and extensive API has helped us rapidly build out technology that has the greatest impact, without being bogged down by building non-core systems.
Current is creating the new way to spend, save, and grow your money. Be a part of the journey by checking us out at current.com.
