UX Research
Salesforce is a B2B customer relationship management platform that helps unite marketing, sales, commerce, service and IT teams. Slack Connect, a Salesforce product, allows you to work with people outside your company in channels and direct messages (DMs). By moving conversations out of emails, you can work securely and collaboratively with partners, vendors, or customers.
Planned and conducted interviews
Analyzed data through affinity mapping
Report Writing
Presented findings to larger team
Salesforce team continued the project with a diary study
Making Salesforce’s products “play nicely together” to actually achieve a 360-view is difficult. Salesforce is built on acquisitions—they buy up competitors and leading performers in strategic spaces, and retrofit the tools to work with their platform.
An integrated automated workflow, powered by a dedicated Slack bot, to streamline the submission of market requests, schedule meetings, approve requests, provide team updates, and more—enhancing efficiency and team collaboration.
Process
The idea is that Salesforce will remain the data repository—the “source of truth”—and Slack will be the “engagement layer.” Slack is where much of the collaboration and communication about the work is already being done. So why not bring Salesforce experiences into Slack.
For what “jobs” are our customers currently using Slack Connect alongside SF products?
What are the Salesforce use cases that could be made better by Slack Connect?
Where has Slack Connect struggled to be successful?
Requirements
Must be Salesforce employees (due to resource limitations)
Must use Slack Connect at least weekly
Must use Salesforce product at least weekly
Recruited
10 total participants
Various business functions: Product development, IT, Marketing, Sales
Various work experiences:
>10 years: 4
6-10 years: 3
<=5 years: 3
Desk Research
To understand Slack Connect, its strengths and weaknesses.
Keywords we researched: Cloud, CSM, Service Case, Workflow, Huddle, Swarm, etc.
This also included a competitive overview of the main competitors in order to identify the strengths, weakness, differentiators and opportunities.
User Interview
To identify the use cases of Slack Connect & Salesforce products.
How do they currently use Slack Connect?
What's their experience with Slack Connect + other Salesforce products?
We created a semi-structured script with 5 pre-defined questions and follow-ups.
We conducted 10 interviews of 45 minutes each.
Async Focus Group
To foster conversation between people in different business lines and learn more about the pain points in our user’s JTBD.
To follow up with the same participants as in the interviews.
7 participated in total.
Overwhelming: There are a lot of notifications, it’s hard to search through info, there are too many channels to track.
Low Adoption Rate: It’s difficult to get outsiders to use Slack Connect, especially if they use a competitor’s software.
Transparency: It’s difficult to see the process after someone gets an invitation--have they accepted the invitation? It’s difficult to know who has access to a document once it is shared to the channel.
Give updates/announcements
Track project progress
Make and approve requests
Arrange meetings
Gather customer feedback
Collaborate async on projects
Share links and documents with partners, customers, external teams, etc.
Have fun, fast, and secure conversations
“There isn't an outside of just copy and pasting links, there's not an easy way to pull Salesforce information into Slack or associate a Slack thread or convo back into Salesforce. They are 2 ships sailing the same direction but separate, instead of them being bonded into one”
Develop an integrated automated workflow and a dedicated bot within Slack to streamline the process of submitting market requests, scheduling meetings, etc.
Design an interface system that lists urgent/important content in a hierarchy such as a way of pinning channels (e.g., favorites, prioritization, inboxes).
Incorporate Slack Connect communication without having to download the app.
Allow an inviter to more easily see the status of an invitation by redesigning the current status design or by teaching users its current location.
When sharing a document with a channel, display permissions alongside what is being sent (i.e., a Quip document).
Time Limitations
We needed to approach research methods creatively under time constraints and Covid, such as using async focus groups.
Async Focus Group
Real-time focus groups might provide more in-depth insights but can also lead to biased responses. To mitigate this, we actively interacted with participants to foster balanced conversations.
Repeated Participants
An advantage is we were able to dive deeper into specific details in our conversations with our participants.
Desk Research
A must! Helps understand the company and product otherwise it is easy to get lost.
Interviews
Always pilot test! And revise guide.
Ask clarifying questions when something is not clear.
Use the power of silence to motivate users to continue talking.
Focus Group
Good to have back-up async methods prepared in case of any constraints on the participants’ side.
Client Meetings
Overall positive experience: Insightful feedback + mentorship.
Important to come prepared and have a meeting agenda ready and list of questions.