Slack Customer Service

Slack is a company that has always impressed me with how they handle customer service. They take a customer friendly approach to a number of areas that traditional enterprise software companies handle very poorly.

When we first set up on Slack, some people were active users and others were not. I would get emails from Slack about user inactivity — and they would credit my account back the cost of users not using the platform.

It wasn’t a ton of money, but it was so unexpected and unusual it really stuck with me. They were doing the right thing — and lowering the cost barrier to trying out the service.

More recently, I received the following notice:

I’ve seen a lot of enterprise SLAs. Many companies don’t actively report on their SLA performance and almost all require you to ask for credits based on a service disruption. Getting a pro-active notice about an SLA violation and then an automated credit to the account based on that is incredibly unusual.

These types of actions on Slack’s part have made me an incredibly loyal customer. While most SaaS companies are going the other direction, they are clearly not only focused on delighting end users, but administrators as well. I’d love to see more SaaS companies lean into doing things like this. It may not be the best choice for the bottom line — but loyal customers are a tremendous asset over the long term.

Originally published at jeffkeltner.com on August 2, 2018.