There are many out of the box Slack integrations that are great to have, but the ones that really count are the ones that are particular to your business processes and initiatives. Since Slack came on the scene, we’ve done many integrations for partners. These range from simple form and asset interactions to site health and downtime all the way through complex CMS and multi-step conditions across a web application.
Here are some of the benefits that we have seen for our partners:
Transparency
The one integration that we immediately do for our partners is a downtime notification in our Pingdom channel in Slack. This immediate notfication starts a process on our end to alert partners and get the right people informed and involved to confirm and define the downtime.
Our “Service Status” channel in Slack is keeping us aware of outages and incidents across not just our partner infrastructure but also our internal tools and applications like Asana, Google, ActiveCampaign etc.
How this transparency has helped our partners, is that incidents and downtime are not just something that a select group are made aware of. Everyone can see the information and follow along from initial detection all the way through to RCA. Because the process is transparent, partners and individuals know that issues are being handled.
Collaboration
When you have a diverse and global workforce sometimes people responsible for one end of a process do not know when changes are made to another point along the way. If changes are made, individuals are sometimes responsible to communicate changes, which can be problematic.
If you have an Slack integration which seamlessly lets both parties know when changes are made, you are not reliant on an email sent to the wrong person or a person on leave or even a person who is no longer with your organization. A message with relavant details can be sent to a shared channel (eg. Marketing Initiatives) and people can collaborate in the thread or linked task.
Accountability
We help our partners create integrations for their marketing processes so that all the parts of their organization have the ability to see information crucial to their business.
Accountability is key, especially for small agile marketing organizaitons. Slack integrations help surface problems and unlock information so that decisions are made sooner in your workflow.
If you have a form integration that lets your know immediately when the form is not working or if the asset link is broken or maybe if the page has been changed by an internal A/B test and is not working correctly you can do something about it immediately. You don’t have to wait until much later when you have already lost leads and are struggling to understand why form submissions have dropped.
Responsiveness
You can achieve increased responsiveness to information from your marketing site when you create integrations and workflows around your important processes.
The sooner you get important information about the state of your important processes, the more quickly problems are resolved. Dedicated channels and messages mean that there are more eyes on the information and that you see these problems as they arise rather than days or weeks after they are finally uncovered.
If you wanted to know that a javascript error in your signup flow is interferring with your signup button, a Ghost Inspector or Cypress test integrated with a marketing or Dev-Ops Slack channel could alert you as soon as this happens. You don’t want to wait for someone to file a ticket or send you a screenshot.
Websites are growing more and more complex and interconnected. This interconnectedness means your business processes need even more attention to make sure they are working as expected.