All your product insight is already in Slack
How Trail use Slack’s Reacji Channeler to tag and collate customer feedback
Customer feedback comes from three places at Trail:
- In-app messages via Intercom
- Interviews, meetings and phonecalls
- Good ol’ email
For an early stage startup, this feedback can be gold. We recently moved to a 6-week delivery cycle with 3 projects per cycle. For a project to make it into a cycle, we need solid proof of its value. Customer feedback gives us this.
However, finding and making sense of the disparate feedback wasn’t easy — we needed a searchable archive.
First try was Productboard, where one of their better features is Research. This allows you to post (or integrate) insights, then tag and link them to features. It’s great for product managers, but the wider team had no other reason to visit so it fell by the wayside
Next, we went to the most common source — Intercom — which everyone rotates onto for support. They too have tagging, and by forwarding email we could cover 2 of our 3 sources. But what about verbal feedback? In theory you could add Notes to a conversation, but Intercom don’t currently support note tagging. This was a deal-breaker for us.
And that’s when Slack announced their Reacji Channeler — “A silly name for a useful tool”.
It all happens in Slack already. Intercom, email, meeting notes, ideas — everyone and everything in one place. The natural gathering place.
Here’s what we did:
- Created #project_name channels for all the main areas we’re exploring
- Created custom emojis using the same naming eg. :project_name:
- Connected emojis with channels using the Reacji Channeler
- Add the right Reacji to any message that could be useful in future
So now, as we line up projects for the next cycle, we have a single channel per project of feedback, collected by different people from different sources.
It’s been a few months and it’s working a treat — give it a go!
Effortless Operations
Trail is a smart task management app for retail and hospitality businesses.
