Rally Around Your Customers’ Experience with Slack + Autopilot

We’re excited to announce the Slack integration with Autopilot, which lets companies include automated Slack messages into their marketing and amass a searchable digest of customer events as they happen. Integrating Slack with marketing automation helps teams rally around their customers by building real-time feedback loops, cross-pollinating ideas between teams, and growing through transparency and responsiveness. Or in the words of VentureBeat, “if Autopilot is the orchestra for customer data, Slack is in the control booth, telling the mixer what levels to adjust on the fly.”

Marketing’s evolving responsibility for the customer journey

Companies who put the customer experience first are growing faster from word-of-mouth referrals, raving loyal customers, and predictable financial success. To fuel this growth, marketing’s role is shifting from simply driving inbound and outbound awareness into taking responsibility for the entire customer journey. Doing so starts with creating internal transparency through customer feedback, and ensuring consistent, timely touchpoints on your customer’s preferred communication channel. In case you haven’t heard of Slack, it’s a message-based platform for team communication. Slack integrates with third-party apps like Google Drive, Asana, Twitter, GitHub, and Dropbox.

What you can do with the Slack + Autopilot integration

In the same way that Autopilot can send an email or text message in response to marketing or product events (e.g. lead capture forms being completed, emails clicked, CRM fields changed, Segment events fired, etc.), it can also send messages to Slack channels. This might include “sales”, “onboarding”, “marketing”, “support”, or “interesting moments” channels. Since Slack is open and shareable, this provides a transparent forum for teams to collaborate in and be more responsive to user needs. Let’s step through an example: a new user, say Jesse Pinkman, signs up for a free trial of your product by filling out a website form (we won’t ask what you sell). This triggers an Autopilot journey that automatically sends a welcome email to your new trialist, and notifies your team of the signup via a Slack notification. integration-slack-img-updated Autopilot sends a configurable Slack message to your “Sales” channel, so that your reps can oooh and aaahhh at their new trialist and his “Enterprise.” Your team can work collaboratively to help Jesse get up and running, while referencing key information such as his company size and how he heard about your business. And because this event is stored in Slack, it’s permanently searchable…in case someone comes asking about why you know Jesse. Live Slack notification. Other examples of how you could use the integration:

- Marketers: can keep tabs on marketing performance and important milestones, such as new signups, cancellations, downloads, website visits, email clicks, etc.
- Support Agents: can collect customer feedback in real-time and act quickly on new user challenges, such as customers failing to complete certain important milestones
- Product Managers: can focus on user adoption and product engagement by viewing important in-app events as they happen, including important metadata associated with those events
- Directors: can create searchable repositories for collaboration around customer needs that are permanently stored and available for institutional learning and compliance
- Executives: can build better cross team alignment and internal communication by pushing important marketing events to various channels and users, which naturally encourages cross-functional collaboration with a sense of urgency

The possibilities are vast.

How do I set up the Slack and Autopilot integration?

The integration with Slack is live today in Autopilot. You can find the “Send Slack Message” icon in the “Actions” sections of the journey canvas. Also, check out this step-by-step guide on how to integrate Slack. We highly recommend giving Slack a test run for your team communication if you haven’t yet… As you use the new Slack integration, we’d love to hear how you’re using it to get real-time customer feedback, share ideas between teams, and create better customer journeys. To learn more about how you can use Slack + Autopilot, join us for an exclusive webinar on Wed, June 3 with Slack’s Director of Marketing, Brad Morris on “How to Rally Around the Customer and Skyrocket Growth.”