Should Chatbot Agencies and Their Clients Collaborate in Slack?
Hint: It mostly depends on your clients.
If you’re a marketing agency pitching chatbots, Slack can be a valuable tool in your toolkit. Slack has more than 12 million daily active users and both small and large businesses have embraced Slack for team communication and collaboration. If you’re new to Slack (or have been somewhat reluctant to dive in) this video should give you a brief overview of what Slack can do to boost productivity.
Whether your clients embrace Slack though to communicate and collaborate on a chatbot project can be determined when you scope out their project.
Scoping out your chatbot project
In order to determine whether Slack is right for a client project, you’ll want to begin by asking your client if they already use Slack. If they do, then Slack should be an easy pitch because they already understand the value. If they are not using Slack, then you can share a video which provides a general overview on how Slack works and its minimum viable benefit.
The minimum viable benefit is that Slack provides a collaborative space for an agency and a client to communicate about and throughout a project.
Once you’ve established Slack as a viable collaboration tool for your project you can determine if Janis for Slack is going to be useful. Janis is a bot that lives inside a Slack workspace and helps manage an AI integration. Every time you onboard a new client, just say Add a bot to Janis and you can set up a bot project, monitor a bot for problems, and fix problems fast.
Keep in mind…
Slack has its own learning curve though so you need to keep this in mind. If you’re pitching Slack to a client and you get some resistance from your client to using Slack, or you’re confident that your client would be slow to adopt Slack, or you just think that introducing Slack would overwhelm your client, consider pitching a completely managed service where you’ll manage the entire AI integration for them using your own internal Slack workspace. Here is a script you can use in your Slack pitch to clients.
Even if Slack isn’t a great fit for your client, you can still use a Slack workspace for your agency to manage chatbot projects, and if you’re connecting a Facebook bot to Janis, then your client can still pause and resume Dialogflow to chat live with their customers and without using Slack. (You can pause Dialogflow just by sending a message from the Facbeook Inbox).
In short, there are lots of ways to set this up. As an agency, you might have a single Slack workspace to monitor all of your client’s chatbots, or if your clients want to collaborate with you in Slack and be active participants in managing conversations from Slack, you should create a dedicated Slack workspace for the project.
You can see here that we have our own internal Janis workspace which my team uses to collaborate on internal projects, but we also have client and partner workspaces. We can just toggle between workspaces easily, or add a new workspace.
It’s strongly recommended that you set up a separate workspace for a chatbot project for a few reasons:
1. You don’t have to join your client’s internal workspace and be part of their internal discussions and projects.
2. They don’t have to join your workspace and be part of your agency projects and discussions which include your other client projects.
3. Janis will transcribe chatbot conversations in Slack and open Slack channels to communicate with end users. This in itself is a reason to have a separate workspace. The workspace becomes dedicated to the operations of the bot.
Who should create a Slack workspace, the agency or the client?
From an administrative perspective, it doesn’t matter who creates the Slack workspace for the project as long as you and your clients both have admin access to the workspace. You can see here that I created the workspace so I’m the primary owner, but I can always transfer ownership of the workspace to another user. In your case, if you create the workspace, you can always transfer ownership to your client.
From a billing perspective there are other considerations. Slack has a free account, but at some point you’re likely going to want to pay for a project Slack workspace, but that doesn’t mean that your client should input their billing details into Slack. Clients generally want to get once invoice from an agency for services rendered and you can always just include the cost of Slack in your agency invoice, passing on the cost of Slack to your client. The same applies to services from Janis.
You also can take advantage of “Sub Accounts”, a billing feature from Janis geared towards agencies.
Sub Accounts?
Janis bills per workspace, but a Sub-Account allows you to include multiple workspaces on a single Janis plan.
Your configuration would look something like this where your agency would have one workspace to manage all of your client chatbot projects but with separate Slack workspaces for each of your client projects.
Your agency workspace would be the “Primary Account” with Janis and all of your client workspaces would be “Sub Accounts”.
Setting Up Sub Accounts
If you’ve never connected Slack to Janis before, you’ll probably see that you have a Personal Account. This is what we refer to an account using only your Google Account to login to Janis:
If you click the arrow in the purple nav bar, you can see how you can easily connect one, or more Slack workspaces. This way you can toggle between different workspaces.
Here I have multiple Slack workspaces connected to Janis and I can switch between them.
The billing tab in the purple nav is specific to the selected workspace, so first ensure the selected the workspace in the purple nav bar is the workspace you want to use as your Primary Account. This is the workspace that will be billed by Janis. Note that if you only signed into Janis with Google (Your Personal Account) you can use that as your Primary Account and then can connect Slack workspaces and set those as Sub Accounts).
Now click Billing in the purple nav bar for the active workspace and click the Sub Accounts tab:
You can see below that I have our Janis workspace and it’s the Primary Account. There are other workspaces listed below that indicated as Sub Accounts.
Only the Primary Account is billed by Janis. To make additional Slack workspaces a Sub Account, just click the “Connect” button and connect additional workspaces.
With Sub Accounts, not only is just the Primary Account billed, but if your client(s) ever needs to access Janis either through Slack, or through the Janis website, then they would not have access to any billing information. You can see here that since my Janis workspace is the primary account, it has a billing option in the purple navigation bar.
However, if I toggle to a workspace designated as a Sub Account, any member of the Sub Account workspace would not have access to any billing information from Janis. There is no billing option in the purple navigation.
As you can see there is not only a cost savings associated with Sub Accounts (One plan covers multiple workspaces, rather than having a Janis plan for each workspace), but agencies can also be a single point of contact for all billing relating to Janis and optionally agencies can. monetize Janis-as-a-service.
Other Helpful Resources for Chatbot Agencies
👉 The real money is in Dialogflow
👉 Setting Client Expectations for Dialogflow
👉 How to scale an AI Agency
👉 How Janis for Slack works: The Complete YouTube Playlist
👉 Statement of Work Template For Agencies: Did you know that I teach a Dialogflow course with School of Bots? It’s geared towards agencies and while the 40+ videos are helpful, the bonuses content is valuable. I include my Statement of Work agency template that I used to secure a 6-figure Dialogflow Integration contract. Check it out!
