Why companies build Slack integrations

The whole wide, integrated world of Slack

Slack is where work happens. (Plus some other stuff.)

Everything else should be built into Slack. Slack is hot.

There are a bunch of Slack communities and every day bot on bot on bot crop up.

Companies are making their own internal integrations because they want to get comfortable and customize their workflows or they’re building product integrations because, well, Slack is cool and practical and above and beyond wonderful (see the custom messages feature below for your enjoyment). And they/we wanna be a part of that.

Boris VvZ actually shared the story behind this custom message with me. Here it is: “A few months ago I thought I’d take the morning off and hit the gym and sauna. I was wearing sweat pants and sweatshirt and dropped my underwear on the ground in the dressing room. I decided to just go commando, as nobody would notice anyway, so I was wearing only my sweat suit. When I arrived at the office all our sponsors and partners were waiting in a room for a meeting I thought would be the next day. Most awkward meeting ever.” Thanks for sharing, Boris.

We just recently released our own Slack integration for booking meeting rooms because we’re on a mission to create the best, the simplest and the most awesomest meeting room booking experience ever!

Our @joan-bot is still in beta but it’s growing. And we’ve made it open and free to everyone so everyone can enjoy the groove of booking straight from Slack.

This is how you do it: Send a DM to @joan-bot with “free room,” “Get/Find me a room,” “Any free rooms?”, “Which room is free?”, etc. and JOAN will give you a list of free rooms.

Let’s integrate and make our customers happy

We also talked with a bunch of companies that developed their own Slack integrations because that made sense for their customers and their product. This is their experience.

Steelray Software launched a chatbot called Nia which integrates users’ Herrmann International HBDI® thinking preference profile data into Slack, providing personalized communication and collaboration tips and advice in the moment.

Every Steelray employee takes the HBDI assessment during onboarding, and we use the profile data and Whole Brain Thinking concepts in meetings, projects, and daily interaction. We’re also big Slack users. So we built a chatbot called ‘Nia’ to give our team instant access to HBDI data within Slack. It’s worked so well that we brought it to Herrmann International and have been working with them to enhance it. We’re currently running pilot programs to hone Nia’s skills and understanding before we launch to the public.

Rich Goidel of Steelray Software

Betsy Summers of Herrmann International adds: “We’re excited to bring this to more organizations. We live Slack every day ourselves, so this has helped us get more value out of both Slack and our assessment. We’re ‘eating our own cooking’!”

This is something that’s happened for JOAN as well! Living Slack day in and day out and booking our own meeting rooms through our product, the only logical thing was to bring the two together and enhance them. First through an API and then through a Slack integration.

YouEarnedIt got the idea to integrate with Slack from a customer.

The catalyst for our Slack integration was one of our customers leveraging our API during an internal hackathon to build their own integration. We saw the opportunity to build and improve on their idea and spread the Slack integration to all our customers. We wanted to create a simple way for employees to recognize and reward one another without ever leaving Slack. Now users can automatically post any public recognitions at their company to a Slack channel, whether they are sent through Slack or through the YouEarnedIt web application, giving them another way to increase employee engagement.

C.K. Sample III of YouEarnedIt

When a Slack integration just makes sense

By integrating with Slack companies can overcome challenges, grow their product and offer more value to their customers.

This is what happened for a bunch of companies that are now happily Slacking away.

We were tasked with building an online platform for a client which implemented an interactive RSS builder and APIs. It needed to be accessible across all of the client’s locations so, in order to facilitate real-time inter-location communication between their staff, we integrated Slack.

Matthew Whatley of Blue Wren

We built a Slack integration early on within our online survey tool, Survey55. The main reason was because how Slack’s users use the tool. They seem to be people that work in smaller teams (even within large companies), quickly adopt new tools, and are really OK with communicating completely within Slack. So sending surveys that your team can answer right within Slack or getting your website survey data live as it comes in just seemed natural.

Patrick Chukwura of Survey55

Slack is a significant link in the workflow chain of many of our customers, however, it doesn’t cover document management issues such as editing, signing and sending out documents from within an organization’s team. Since we use Slack ourselves at PDFfiller, we understood the need for a tool to take care of handling document management straight from Slack. Our app notifies a channel when a document has been signed or filled out. The notification allows a Slack user to go straight to PDFfiller to manage their documents.

Eugene Gorelik of PDFfiller

Butterfly, is a management coaching platform that integrates with Slack. Managers and HR teams use Butterfly in Slack to connect anonymous real-time feedback from their teams. That data is then used to build custom coaching profiles for individual managers. Simple.

Katie Perry of Butterfly

Favro, an agile cloud-based project management solution integrates with Slack and allows users to post updates from Favro directly to their Slack channels without switching in between. That’s time optimization right there.

Patric Palm of Favro

An average professional receives over 100 emails every day, so Slack’s vision of “Less Email” aligns with RFPIO’s vision to help busy teams increase productivity. The need for quick, streamlined communication is even more prevalent when responding to RFPs, which often come in at the last minute then require a quick turnaround. Strong teamwork across departments is necessary to create quality responses that win opportunities. Creating Slack channels versus an onslaught of emails empowers RFPIO’s clients to collaborate well — and to focus on priorities without the stress of cluttered inboxes.

Ganesh Shankar of RFPIO

Zeal created a chatbot for Slack called Ava, which directly interacts with the team to understand how they are doing and measure company culture. She analyzes company culture by providing real-time information and insights on the health of an organization.

Mark of Zeal

We wanted to introduce a bot that would allow Slack users to interact with their company’s Samanage Service Desk environment using an intuitive interface. It is currently command-oriented but will become a conversational bot powered by natural language processing (NLP). The bot will interact conversationally, orchestrating IT service management tasks like changing the status of an incident, submitting service requests, and suggesting knowledge articles, from a single interface. The bot contributes to faster resolution times, streamlined service interactions, and higher end user satisfaction.

Doron Gordon of Samanage

We decided to create a Slack integration based on customer requests. DialMyCalls offers the ability to send a phone call to a group people and it’s widely used for employee notifications. With many of our customers also on Slack, we started to get requests on how they could tie in and send a mass phone call to all of their employees on Slack if they needed too. The integration went seamlessly and has been a huge win for our company and for our customers. Now if there is an emergency or important situation our customers can quickly send a phone call out to all their employees alerting them in seconds.

David B. of DialMyCalls

Slack has a secret sauce. It’s the gregarious, fun-loving personality that makes companies want to stick around and connect their products to.

It’s creating the platform for the workplace of the future.

We’ll keep more articles like this coming. And some behind the scenes as well!

Estera Dezelak runs on coffee and words. Favorite word for today: bombinate.