👋 Today, we're announcing Channeled, a unified inbox in Slack for customer-obsessed teams.
Thirty years ago, most business interactions started and ended with the sales process. Most of what was sold was sold upfront, to a single or handful of execs, with little or no ongoing management. If support was provided, it was reactive and transactional.
Most of our current internal tools were built for (and in) this era. The result is a lot of disparate software handling product feedback, marketing, support, sales and success largely as separate channels; a constant flurry of internal coordination – and few teams who actually understand and communicate to customers with confidence.
The way companies win has changed.
Today, every team knows that in order to survive and build incredible product, they have to invest in customer success – thoughtfully, responsively, and often. Customer feedback drives product; customer referrals drive revenue; customer support drives loyalty. Winning this way is a full-team effort. Although we often describe a go-to-market shift over the last few decades from top-down to bottom-up, a shift from single-player to multiplayer might be more accurate.
The way we win customers has changed, but in most cases, our tools have not.
We’re building Channeled to make working with customers accessible to every team at a company, and to help teams stay organized and purposeful while doing so. Our first product is a unified inbox for teams who use shared Slack channels with their customers, where this multiplayer approach to customer-focused work is accelerating: enabling them to manage cross-organization, cross-functional conversations without hopping from channel to channel; to share visibility; and to develop relationships with customers where they’re most engaged.
Over the last few months we’ve worked with a cohort of fast-growing teams to help them serve hundreds of customers over Slack, bringing the same dedication to customer success and support that they do to their products. Today, our partners are using Channeled to:
Create customer engagement and trust.
Slack channels break down barriers between companies that would normally prevent valuable feedback from being shared and cross-team rapport from being built. Yet, it doesn’t matter how much rapport has been created if communication becomes inconsistently responsive – which happens to all of us when there are simply too many channels and notifications. Channeled enables internal teams to respond quickly and reliably to every message from a single Slack app – while giving their customers the native experience of dedicated 1-1 channels.
Close the loop on every customer-facing issue.
Support is table stakes. With a built-in workflow for replying to, triaging, and tracking messages that matter, Channeled is a command center for teams to follow-up, add comments, and share actions internally in a streamlined flow. As issues are completed, Channeled puts teams in control of when and how progress is shared – giving their customers visibility and confidence that nothing is lost.
Scale customer success beyond one-(wo)man heroics.
All too often, customer relationships start – and abruptly end – with a single team member. Channeled equips teams to scale with their growth, providing dedicated customer mapping for sustainable coverage; insights into performance data for managing quality; and robust integrations into tools like Salesforce and Zendesk for stronger alignment as organizations mature.
Channeled was born out of a real, painful need we observed by working with (and in!) many customer workspaces directly. We’ve learned what makes teams using Slack in this way so special: at these companies, customer conversations aren’t the isolated responsibility of support, but rather shared moments of learning across teams and opportunities to amplify confidence with customers. The result is a generation of companies inventing for customers and going to market in delightful, category-defining ways.
As for us, we’re now opening the product to a few more design partners – so if what we’re working on has resonated with you and you’re interested in learning more, or you just want to stay in touch, we'd love to hear from you.
Back to building – see you all on the other side.
Bec
Thanks to David, Nancy, Ryan, Jake, Kelsey, Krishna, Peter, Wensheen, Tommy, Hiten, Kaytlin, Jen, Megha and Austin for reading drafts of this.
