ClickFunnels & Slack Integrations
Building conversational management infrastructure for our team employing Dashbot, Asana and Slack
One of our favorite affordances of conversational UI is the opportunity to provide extremely user support directly through the interface. Gone are the days of separate ticketing systems and email threads along with your users??with conversational UI, your support and sales teams can be integrated directly into the user abilities of the product!
Gratify allows anyone to submit tasks and work with genuine freelancers from their own Slack workplace. Because our service is a powered by either AI and people, we're constantly reviewing users conversations with our bot to assure a good customer abilities. As weve grown, weve discovered that managing only a few conversations for quality is difficult.
How do chatbot teams manage user conversations? This was a new issue. After months of iteration, our team constructed a solution that utilizes three of our favorite tools (Dashbot, Asana and Slack) to create a highly organized and actionable conversation management system.
From notification to action, our conversation management infrastructure takes advantage of outside tools to create a reliable internal support process. This was our secret sauce, but any chatbot company can apply it to their own workflows. Below is how we constructed our conversation management system at Gratify:
First, we've got a bot notify a private Slack channel when a new user begins a conversation with our chatbot.
Gratify is either an outside-dealing with chatbot and an internal notification tool for our team.
Next, our bot creates an Asana price ticket for the conversation thread.
We use Asanas API to mechanically create tickets from our bot.
Finally, the Asana price ticket contains links to Dashbots are living transcripts product, which allows our support operators to send messages to the user as the bot.
Dashbots are living transcripts allows our team to respond to the user as our chatbot.
When additional notes are needed, our team can add details to the Asana price ticket.
In our case, outstanding conversations are unsolved tickets.
The result has been magnificent. It has helped our team (which is 100% remote) communicate and respond to user problems quickly and efficiently. Are you running a chatbot and desire to build something similar? Ill explain every and every ingredient to our sauce.
A Slack channel for triage
If youre running a chatbot, your team desire to have a Slack channel. Why? When new leads and problems come through your funnels, you could be able to only communicate with something of your internal team.
Outside of in-adult communication, Slack is the simplest method to communicate situations and cases that needs to persist (and be found again later). We were already employing Slack in our team, but we also wanted our sales/support funnel to feed into Slack.
A notification funnel
To provide support, sales, and mediation, we funnel our conversation notifications into a private channel. We have specified event types and keywords that have more or less significance to our team, and then tag every and every notification as such. When a user messages our bot, it appears in our notification funnel and alerts our team of pertinent details like username, team name, and conversation particulars.
Our bot notifies a private Slack channel when a conversation with the chatbot begins.
We mentioned up to now that Gratify is a mixture of either AI and people. Support operators are what we dub the human side of our service. These individuals consist of our core team members who comb and reply to user transcripts with Gratify (they are able to only see transcripts the place Gratify is invited into the channel or directly messaged). Operators can reply as the bot to support use cases which are more open-ended, like price-change requests, disputes, responsibility, and other problems that our freelancers and clients run into. Our channel notifications comprise a button to clearly mark the conversation status to all of our support operators. Since our team is distributed, this helps avoid internal work duplication and eases communication.
We only have two statuses for our notifications. Reviewed or spam. Reviewed signifies that a support operator has taken on the conversation and handled it if mandatory.Spam is used to let other operators know that the conversation is likely spam (specially useful if your bot is installed in a cryptocurrency Slack channel) and will prevent notifications from that conversation sooner or later.
A price ticket for every and every conversation
After only a few weeks with our spankin new notification system, the team found it hard to keep track of all of the active conversations. We decided to use Asana to log and track man or females conversation threads??and this has been a total game changer!
Tickets mechanically open on Asana when conversation events are triggered.
As part of our conversation management initiative, we coded Gratify to create an Asana price ticket anytime a user begins a conversation with our app. This process tags and populates conversation details for our team to care for the price ticket appropriately.
Using Asana, our support operators can keep better track of user journeys through feedback and price ticket assignments. Whenever a user sends another message to Gratify, that price ticket might be updated accordingly, referencing all of the preceding feedback and cases pertaining to that thread.
A are living takeover solution
The capability to provide customer service through our bot-powered service is vital. We have established notifications (via Slack) and a ticketing solution (via Asana) to manage many conversations right now, but how will we leap into these conversations and help instruction manual a successful user interaction?
For this, we rely upon Dashbot: a bot analytics service. Dashbot has its own logging, transcripts, and analytics, but the one function we cannot are living without is the capability to leap into conversations with are living human takeover!
Live transcripts with Dashbot.
In our Asana tickets, we include a link to Dashbot which references a users are living transcript. Once one of our support operators click that link, they are redirected to the users conversation inside of Dashbot. Our support operators can insert messages into the bots conversation with the user as needed, and once the scenario is resolved, they mark the related Asana price ticket complete to close the loop!
Do what you do higher, outsource something
Over the past few months, our team has been employing this solution with success. It has greatly improved our capability to provide sales and support to our users in a timely fashion, simultaneously as growing internal transparency amongst something of the team. Were firm believers in do what you do higher, outsource something, and our conversation management infrastructure embraces that phrase.
Slack, Asana, and Dashbot have iterated into their respective niches of shared knowledge, undertaking management, and conversation analytics. Tying these tools together to create a conversation management infrastructure for our team introduces new organizational dependencies; however, it also ensures we're employing the head technology for every and every area, simultaneously as allowing us to rapidly develop options for our workflows with much less overhead than drafting a wholly custom solution.
Most of Slacks initial growth was thanks to word-of-mouth marketing (and undoubtedly, even today this continues to be Slacks #1 priority).
The initial word-of-mouth spread is at least partially attributed to Slacks famous founder: Stewart Butterfield. Before Slack, Butterfield was widespread as the founding father of the picture sharing platform, Flickr.
As expected, Butterfield had the receive advantages of a lot of contacts, including those in the media, that he may perhaps leverage to get the word out.
But this doesnt mean you cant replicate a lot of what Butterfield did to generate product hype and get feedback to make your product the head it can be. Butterfield noticed a 4-step sequence.
Step 1: Once you have a workable product, persuade all people you know to are attempting it out (freed from charge, of course) and give you customer feedback.
As Butterfield recalls in an interview, just only a few months earlier than Slacks beta release in May 2013, he said, We begged and cajoled our friends at other corporations to are attempting it out and give us feedback. We had maybe six to ten corporations to begin with that we found this way.[3]
Slacks goal with this was to iron out any problems earlier than their product hit the market simultaneously as also starting to generate some cognizance. Plus, this gave Slack their first few testimonials from Medium, Rdio, TGC and Cozy.
Here is the first version of the Slack website on Aug 19, 2013 with testimonials from Butterfields friends at other corporations:
Step 2: Find an thrilling hook thatll help you spread the word...and then make sure it keeps spreading.
Slack may perhaps have gotten a lot of cognizance just by leveraging Butterfields fame. But they moved beyond that to create an thrilling hook (and this hook is exactly what you could center of concentration on could you dont have anyone famous onboard).
The hook was: Slack is out to kill email.
Basically all people finds email annoying. So, making this the hook was a good way for Slack to seize peoples concentration.
Just look at the titles of some articles that were written about Slack pre-launch:
Flickr founder plans to kill company e-mails with Slack (CNET)
The Co-Founder Of Flickr Wants to Replace Email At The Office (BI)
Flickr Cofounders Launch Slack, An Email Killer (FC)
Once you have that hook, dont underestimate the energy of traditional media in getting it on the market. Pull all of the strings you can.
For some more inspiration, take a look at Sumos clean two-step process for getting media coverage the following.
And once youve got that media coverage, make sure it doesnt fall flat.
According to Butterfield, just getting the articles revealed is only 20% of the key to media success.
The other 80% is people posting about that article. I practically never go to news websitesits overwhelming how much content material is on the market. But I will pay concentration to what my friends are picking up and sharing.
In other words, dont let your article die a sad, sluggish death just because it wasnt reshared. Promote your content material on social media, community forums and places youve never thought of to get more traffic.
Step 3: Invite people to are attempting out your preview release.
Slacks initial request for feedback and successful media blitz worked - in August, 2013 Slack gave people the threat to request invites to are attempting out their preview release and 8,000 people did so on the very first day. Two weeks later, that variety had practically doubled.[4]
Golden Nugget: Even if your product is in beta, dont call it that. As Butterfield says, that was essentially our beta release, but we didnt desire to call it a beta because then people would think that the service would be flaky or unreliable. Slack known as it a preview releaseinstead.
Milk this beta-testing period for all its worth. Butterfield says, beta-tester feedback is very sizeable to finding those little oversights in a product design.
In other words, this is your threat to get feedback and make your product something people will absolutely love by the time you launch it.
And the more people love your product? The more people thatll be talking about it (to get you that viral word-of-mouth marketing growth).
Step 4: Launch your product to the public!
After youve finished your testing period and managed to generate some cognizance, open up your product to the public. (Slack did this 6 months after their preview release in February, 2014.)
Slack continues to rely closely on word-of-mouth marketing and on brand constructing to generate organic views to their website.
Here is a breakdown of the 108,600,000 website visitors Slack generates today:
This is Slacks public dealing with main site. As you can see, the majority of Slacks traffic comes from direct sources meaning 91.35% of those 108.6 million monthly visitors are going to the website directly (BTW: 108M+ monthly visitors is 5x HubSpots 20M+).
But given that Slack has 4+ million traditionally active users, a notably high percentage are users heading to the website to login.
This high volume of direct traffic may be attributed to that ultra-powerful word-of-mouth cognizance that Slack worked so hard for from December 2012 up until February 2014.
In other words, since so many people already know Slack by name, they just type Slack.com directly into the browser.
Here are the keywords that in fact give some of the most volume of traffic to Slack:
Slack's Referral Traffic [Source]
What sticks out to you? The word Slack shows up in every single one!
Even the 5th organic keyword is just the word Slack in Japanese. Japan is Slacks largest market outside the United States (see proof below).
Slacks traffic profile by state
Slacks other higher keywords, beyond the branded ones, most likely relate directly to their product offering (ie: messaging, team communication, etc).
This all is going back to Slacks magnificent word-of-mouth brand cognizance. Because of it, Slack doesnt put huge amounts of center of concentration on content material marketing or their SEO - their brand name and product offerings do a lot of the work for them.
Heres a breakdown of the traffic Slack gets from social media:
Altogether, Slack gets 800,000+ views monthly from social media.
As you can see, Facebook is a very sizeable driver, pulling in half of all this traffic. Though Slack have collected a lot of followers on Facebook, it seems they use Facebook primarily as a tool to get readers elsewhere.
To begin, their cover picture isnt used to put up for sale Slack itself, but to drive people to their podcast:
And their pinned submit of at the head of the page directs fans to other methods of contact (in other words, they are attempting to pull communications off of Facebook and onto other platforms):
YouTube is Slacks next largest supply of social media traffic and from what I can tell, it's Slacks #1 social customer acquisition channel. It pulls in roughly 155,000 visitors monthly.
Slacks YouTube channel is a mixture of general Slack content material, tutorials, and case studies.
But could you sort Slacks movies by the desired, youll detect that the head performing movies fall into a different category; namely, they are TV advertisements that Slack undoubtedly ran.
Repurposing these successful TV advertisements as YouTube video content material has worked extremely well with the head video claiming more than 15,000,000 views.
Plus, the foxy folks at Slack knew just a solution to get people who enjoyed the video interested ample to click on Slacks website: a CTA that is going to Slacks website but doesnt make any mention of what Slack undoubtedly is.
Since YouTube has such a large-ranging audience, many of whom might no longer know what Slack does, this was a good solution to generate additional pastime and entice viewers to click.
If they had mentioned in the CTA display that they were a messaging app, likely many people wouldnt have bothered to click through because they wouldnt think this was a company applicable to them.
Also, detect the exclusive tracking URL Slack is employing to measure their traffic from this video campaign. It is clean to remember and redirects to their homepage (when you see slack.com/animals you get curious and desire to understand what its all about).
Slack is employing a direct response marketing tactic known as the curiosity-gap to get TV viewers to stop what theyre doing and go to their website, and to also get more clicks on YouTube.
(P.S. Grab 18 more YouTube growth hacks from the pros in this Sumo-sized YouTube growth article)
Check out Slacks full one minute video the following to see exactly what I mean:
Finally, even supposing it takes up a smaller portion of the pie, we might be able tot no longer talk about Twitter. In reality, Twitter has undoubtedly been Slacks most sizeable social media platform.
Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield said:
We bet closely on Twitter. Even if anyone is incredibly captivated with a product, literal word-of-mouth will only get to a handful of people - but when anyone tweets about us, it can be seen by hundreds, even hundreds and hundreds.
In other words, Twitter played a huge role in Slacks viral word-of-mouth growth. Slacks Wall of Love is a perfect example of this.[five]
People can tweet to @SlackLoveTweets to expose their expression of love for Slack.
As for Slacks tweets themselves, helped Slack out in only a few different ways:
They helped Slack build brand cognizance and define their companys voice (a voice thats been so distinctive, they even wrote a Medium article about it).[6]
They help Slack keep their users up-to-date on changes and improvements.
They give Slack a venue for getting customer feedback and speaking with clients.
Twitter as a venue for customer communication has been HUGE for Slack. They rely closely on Twitter for dealing with customer support problems and getting customer feedback.
Today, Slacks customer support team has 18 people alone with a group of 6 making sure Twitter is protected 24/7.
What Slacks use of social media could teach you is this: social media is waiting a lot more than just driving traffic and getting clicks. It also offers the threat to connect along with your clients and help make your brand memorable.
The takeaway: When it comes to social media, you'd like a different strategy for every and every social media platform (side note: this is also exactly what Tony Robbins does to get such massive engagement and followers across his social media platforms). Slack leverages every and every platform in the following ways:
Facebook: to update fans on their blog articles, podcast, event and places they've been featured.
YouTube: to drive customer acquisition with professionally produced product movies and smart direct response calls-to-action.
Twitter: to drive viral word of mouth cognizance with 24/7 customer support.
[TIP #3] SPONSOR EVERY PODCAST IN YOUR NICHE. CUT THE LOSERS. KEEP THE WINNERS.
Slack is very familiar with the podcasting world.
Before developing their own podcast, Slack dabbled (a lot) in sponsoring podcasts. Slacks first CMO, Bill Macaitis, made them an instant marketing priority.
In just a matter of time, Slack was sponsoring about 10 podcasts of all very different audiences. These included Startup (a podcast for entrepreneurs), Reply All (a podcast in regards to the web) and 99% Invisible (a design podcast).
The key the following isnt necessarily sponsoring podcasts that have monster audiences (even supposing this manifestly helps) but sponsoring ones that have loyal audiences that steadily interact with and trust the podcast host.
Beyond this, Slack has also branched out into developing two very distinctive podcasts of their own.
The first of these was a collection known as The Slack Variety Pack podcast.
The podcast itself was pretty weird and offered a notably exclusive voice in a sea of podcasts with repackaged business advice.
Slacks SoundCloud page explained it higher: Think of it as This American Life meets Office Space meets Monty Pythons Flying Circus.
Obviously, the podcast resonated with the audience as there were nearly 2 million listens over the course of 15 episodes.[7]
But perhaps some of the most sizeable thing to take note of is how Slack used this podcast to put up for sale themselves without sounding like a sleazy hard promote. As Macaitis explains, the head podcasts arent trying to promote you something.
And it looks like Slack found just the right steadiness. There are 3 sneaky podcast promotion techniques Slack is employing:
Slacks podcast promotion technique #1:
Beginning every and every episode with a rapid announcement that the podcast content material is added to you by Slack and asking them to go to Slack.com to change your working life for all time.
Slacks podcast promotion technique #2:
Integrating non-salesy CTAs following specific podcast stories (resembling asking people to tweet their own stories to @SlackHQ for a bet to be featured on the podcast after the hosts discussed a crazy workplace story).
Slacks podcast promotion technique #3:
Inviting listeners to share their thoughts and feedback with #SlackVarietyPack at the end of every and every podcast.
The Slack Variety Pack may be finished, but Slack now has another new podcast that uses similar promotional tactics.