What is Slack for and how does it work?

If you work in a marketing or programming agency, there is a good chance that you work with Slack or another digital tool for communication. For the past 3 years, we have said goodbye to email, except for communications made with people outside our organization. Our business partners, freelancers, clients...everyone is in our Slack workspace. But still...what is Slack and how does it work?

Slack is a communication tool for companies that want to be more efficient. Slack was born 6 years ago, in August 2013. Initially, Slack was an internal tool for Butterfield's company, " Tiny Speck ", during the development of Glitch, a now-defunct game. Slack is an acronym for " Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge ". Today Slack has 10 million daily active users in more than 600,000 companies and 150 countries!

How does Slack work?

The simplest way to describe Slack is to say that it is a " Chat ". Like Messenger or WhatsApp, Slack allows you to communicate with other users live, share files, videos, etc. However, where Slack differentiates itself from other chat applications is that it was designed to centralize communications and organize them efficiently.

If you use the free version, Slack will retain a maximum of 10,000 messages in archives and you will not be able to segment access to your communication channels. Therefore, the free version is not very relevant, in my opinion.

Initially, the first step is to create a Workspace for you and your work team. Your Workspace is your private subdomain which will take, for example, the following form: madebyhuddy.slack.com. Only invited people will be able to join your Slack Workspace.

Next, you can create channels. These channels allow you to group conversations on a specific topic and also to grant access only to selected people. For example, if you are working on a website project, you can add the people involved in the project. No need to add accounting! You could name the channel #project-abcd.

If you want to onboard the client into the project, you can then create another channel giving access to the client, for example: #client-project-abcd. Clients tend to respond much faster via Slack than via the (not so good) old emails.

What are the benefits of using Slack?

As its name indicates, Slack for " Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge " features an ultra-efficient " search " functionality. Accessible with the keys " CTRL + K ", the search allows you to find information that would have been lost forever in a typical email inbox. This is definitely the biggest advantage of using Slack.

Slack allows for integration with a ton of applications, like CRMs, enabling the creation of really practical automations. Most good CRMs and good SaaS software have some native integrations with Slack.

What I really like about Slack is that when you take some time to discover the shortcuts and learn to use them, you can quickly become a typing machine, switch channels, find information, etc. without having to use the mouse. The ergonomics of the features are unbeatable.

Leave emails, switch to Slack

Have you ever completely lost control over an email chain? 12 people in CC to keep track of a discussion that only involves 3 people? With Slack, no more email chains. Just save the emails, you barely need to know what Slack is for aside from this incredible feature!

The discussion threads are linear and the information is easily accessible. Do you want to talk to someone specific in a channel without disturbing the 14 subscribers? Easy, with the @ keys, it's possible to notify only the person you want to discuss with.

What is Slack for? To change lives

I know several entrepreneurs who have repeated to me, Slack changes lives. It is one of the easiest digital tools to implement and provides an instant return on investment. Any respectable company must use Slack as much as possible, and as well as possible! So what is Slack for? To regain the pleasure of communicating!

Would you like to have advice for implementing Slack in your company? Send me an email!