Productive teams everywhere are using this bot… (including Slack)
A bot that creates visibility into an organization’s KPIs is transformative. The team at Slack has developed a bot based approach that changes the way their employees look at the business. Slack employees tell me that understanding movements in their metrics has a big impact on their sense of ownership. Team members have transparency into how the company is doing and can see the impact of their work.
When Slack builds a Slack bot, you know it’s worth using. Of course, the team at Slack Headquarters in San Francisco doesn’t just use stock Slack to communicate about their work, they’ve customized their channels with all sorts of integrations.
Slack HQ’s Slack installation has more than 1000 channels, from product development discussions to the typical water cooler chat rooms. One of their most powerful channels is a KPI (key performance indicator) channel. In this channel, team members get daily updates on company performance from a robot built in house. Anyone in the company can join for the latest on revenue, active users and the other numbers that drive their business.
Having those numbers show up inside Slack makes a big difference. Rather than require a context switch from one application to another, the numbers live in Slack, where employees already spend their time. At the same time, at Slack, the messages are segmented into their own channel. If someone isn’t interested in getting up to the minute updates, it’s easy to leave the channel and check-in when they have time.
The power of a KPI bot isn’t just limited to Slack HQ. We’ve spoken to numerous teams that have built similar integrations on top of the Slack platform. Each of them migrated from reports that lived in excel spreadsheets or emails. By moving reports into Slack, teams are seeing huge increases in engagement.
When it comes time to setup a KPI bot, you have a few options. Off the shelf bots like Statsbot for Google Analytics or Sway for Stripe can be a great way to get started. Once you’re ready to go pro, it likely makes sense to build your own bot on top of the Slack Platform.
This article originally appeared in the slash-hyphen newsletter. Interested in hearing more stories about how teams are getting the most out of Slack, subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter here.
