Salesforce Slack Integration: Everything You Need to Know
Salesforce is one of the best tools in the world for managing customer relationships, and Slack is amongst the most popular platforms for communicating at work. By using the two products together, you can make it easier for your two most important teams to communicate with each other and greatly improve your relationships with your customers.
Slack and Salesforce work with almost all of your preferred business apps, so you can consolidate advanced technologies, preconfigure processes, and get better business performance faster. In this detailed guide, I will explain how to connect Slack to Salesforce, what you need to think about when connecting the two, and the most common problems people have when using Salesforce via Slack.
How Does Integration Help?
You can view activities in Salesforce from Slack and also communicate the results on Slack, thanks to the integration between the two platforms. You can send messages back to and from Salesforce Conversation as well as your Slack channel this way.
The SalesForce-Slack Integration allows salespeople to update future job prospects on Slack and enables support reps to access and close bookings all in one place. You can even make custom plug-ins with no-code or low-code features, or you can use the ecosphere of hundreds of applications to meet your business needs.Â
Conventional silos and barriers do not exist anymore because everyone can view the same information on customers and accounts in highly collaborative spaces. The integration makes it easier for people to talk to each other and work together, which is an added benefit for your staff, clients, and even business associates.
The 10 Easy Steps to Integrating Salesforce and Slack
To connect Salesforce to Slack, you need a Salesforce account and a Slack account. The first step in integrating Slack and Salesforce is to add the Salesforce plugin to your Slack profile. Slack recently revised the Salesforce plugin and decided to add many new capabilities and functions to it. You can look for it in Slack’s catalog of apps.
Step 1: Access your Slack profile and start creating a work area. While your Slack profile is being organized, you would be able to see the “General” and “Random” channels here. Let us start by creating a whole new one.
Step 2: Click Add apps in the Apps section of the navigation bar on the left side of the display. This takes you to the page where you can search for Slack apps. Look up Salesforce inside the search field. Click the “Add” button that is next to Salesforce. This should take you to the Salesforce app’s site for the Slack app catalog. To begin the installation, tap “Add to Slack.”
Step 3: You would be taken to a separate page for the Salesforce plugin on Slack. Once more, click the “Add” button. Tap “Allow” to give the app the permissions it needs to finish installing. The Salesforce app has now been added to your Slack profile, and you can find it in your Slack working space underneath the heading “Apps.”
Step 4: Installing the Slack plugin for Salesforce is the next big step in connecting Slack to Salesforce. To implement and set up the Slack plugin in Salesforce, you are required to be a Salesforce Server Admin. Only they possess the right permissions.
Step 5: Log in to your account on Salesforce. Go to the Apps section by clicking on the icon within the navigation. Tap or click “Visit AppExchange” at the top right corner. You can use the search box to look for Slack in the menu.
Just on the bottom right, tap “Get Now.”
Step 6: After that, you can either install the Slack app right into your live environment or first test it in a sandbox. Salesforce recommends that you go for the second option to make sure the integration works well.
Step 7: As of now, we will just put it in place. Under “Install in this Org.,” press “Install Here”. Click “Confirm” as well as “Install” to start the process after you agree to the terms.
Step 8: Lastly, Salesforce offers you the choice to implement the Slack app for only system administrators, only for certain users, or for all users. Choose the option that works best for you, and then click “Install”.
Recognize any other prompts as well as requests for permission during the setup process, and when it is done, go back to your Slack window.
Step 9: As soon as you’ve set up the Slack as well as Salesforce apps, you need to connect your Slack and Salesforce accounts to finish the implementation process. Click the Salesforce icon in the Apps portion of your Slack workspace.
Step 10: In the conversation window for Salesforce, tap “Connect Account” next to “Connect Your Salesforce Account”. Click “Allow” to give Slack the permissions it needs. Slack would also request your consent to connect your account through the Salesforce app. Click on “Okay”. Your Slack as well as Salesforce accounts would be linked once you give the necessary permissions.
Even if you do not configure the Slack app onto your Salesforce profile, you can still link the two programs; however, you will only be able to view the data in Salesforce. But you can use all of the features offered by the two platforms if you configure both Slack and the Salesforce apps.
Why Incorporating Slack with Salesforce is a Good Idea
1. You Never Overlook Vital Information
Utilizing Salesforce app notifications in Slack is an excellent way to ensure you never miss a crucial update about a lead or client. When a company has a large number of sales leads, it can be easy to overlook important data. This will not happen if you have your Slack account set up to get all the important updates right there.
2. You Do Not Have to Change Apps
Swapping around Slack or Salesforce to get the required details is frustrating and costs large teams a lot of time and money each year. With the interconnection between Slack and Salesforce, you can access all data you want on a single platform.
3. Your Sales Department Gets the Most Up-to-Date Info
Correspondence and communications represent a major challenge in large companies with many departments working together to close a lead. These departments include sales, customer relations, developers, financial management, and more. By connecting Slack to Salesforce, you make sure that all team members who need such vital information always know the latest updates. This makes it much harder for people to misunderstand each other and gives everyone a clear picture of what is going on.
When Incorporating Slack With Salesforce, There are Often Problems. Here Are Some.
Problems With Incorporating Slack With Salesforce
Experienced professionals at RTS, however, believe that there are a few drawbacks to this integration and here are three common ones:
1. Not Compatible with Salesforce Essentials
If you are using Salesforce Essentials, the integration between Slack and Salesforce doesn’t always work as well as it could. This is because to set up the Slack plugin for Salesforce, you require API access, which isn’t accessible in Salesforce Essentials.Â
To make the point home, users of Salesforce Essentials cannot communicate or receive updates in Slack or set up mass alerts. They can, nevertheless, look for Salesforce record-keeping activities in Slack and use Salesforce to set up “My Notifications” and channel alerts.
2. The User Experience is Hindered by Technical Problems and Bugs
On the Salesforce Platform exchange, users and customers have often been seen complaining that the Slack app has bugs. These apps cause problems with permissions, trouble with data recovery, and errors that were not expected during rollout. There is not much to say about Salesforce’s software support, likely because Slack is a free tool for Salesforce clients. These things can affect or alter the user experience as a whole and make the SalesForce Slack integration hard to obtain or leverage.
3. Having a Lot of Apps Makes the Process Harder
You have to configure both the Slack plugin for Salesforce as well as the Salesforce widget for Slack to fully connect the two. This makes the process difficult to achieve because there have been multiple variations of the Slack application for Salesforce in the earlier days. Even though the older variants are not fully functional and supported, the Salesforce software swap paperwork still provides a link to them, which is confusing for most users.
The Bottom Line
Salesforce and Slack have long been industry leaders, and connecting them could exponentially increase the features they offer. To get the most out of them, you must properly integrate, set up, and manage them.
Overall, the Slack plugin gives your employees a simple and straightforward way to pull information from Salesforce and add annotations to records while working directly in Slack.Â
The updated SalesForce Slack integration now supports both the Sales and Service tiers of the SalesForce pricing plans, allowing you to post messages across the two programs without leaving the slack interface or switching between them at all.
You can also set up notifications to be notified when records in Slack are modified. All of these features have the potential to save your experts a significant amount of time and keystrokes, allowing these teams to work from a single location, collaborate, and maximize the returns on the resources at their disposal.
If you need to know more about Slack and Salesforce integration, then check out what experts at RTS Labs have to say, and benefit from their specialized advice and services.
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