30+ foundational Salesforce-on-Slack use cases were uncovered, critical in informing future product roadmaps for 20+ product leaders across Salesforce and Slack.

This was a complex, multi-phased, mixed-methods study aimed to provide foundational use case insights to the Salesforce-on-Slack space. These use cases were created to inspire future products and features for the Salesforce and Slack integration, and helped inform future product strategies and roadmaps for this space.

Post-Slack acquisition, our product teams wanted to spot opportunities to build on Slack in order to create better experiences for users accomplishing their Salesforce tasks.

I joined Salesforce full-time right after the $26 billion acquisition of Slack. At this time, product teams were envisioning integrations between Salesforce and Slack in order to deliver on a vision called the “Digital HQ” — the idea of Slack not being only a platform to send messages, but also a conduit between multiple tools (such as Salesforce) — so that people can finish their work better, faster, and more efficiently in this new, remote-working world.

But how might we spot opportunities for Salesforce and Slack? First, we had to outline the ways our customers leverage the two tools, especially in everyday situations.

And now with Slack in the mix, our product teams were eager to spot opportunities to build on Slack in order to create better experiences for users accomplishing their Salesforce-related tasks, especially in everyday situations, where they’re leveraging multiple tools while collaborating with multiple people. However, in order to spot opportunities to incorporate Slack, we had to first outline HOW our customers were already using Salesforce.

In summary, our research goal was to...

*Use cases: aka, “Jobs-to-be-Done” — what are our customers hiring Salesforce to do for them?
*Salesforce products: aka “clouds”, such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, etc.
*Job functions: aka “Lines of Business”, such as sales, marketing, service, etc.

And let's break this down into specific research questions:

• What are customer teams (not individuals) trying to achieve together?
• In what situations do teams and individuals use multiple Salesforce products to achieve a “job”?
• Are there opportunities to provide easier & seamless multi-cloud, multi-player experiences through Slack?
  

Gathering POVs on the State of Salesforce & Slack with a "Listening Tour"

After reviewing existing literature, we interviewed product leaders from Slack and Salesforce to gain insights into their POV on the present and future-day bridge between Slack and Salesforce. From each stakeholder, we sought to understand:

After screening for participants based on the criteria we gathered from stakeholder interviews, we followed 25 Salesforce users through a five-day work week in a diary study.

Following our stakeholder interviews, we synthesized these conversations to hone in deeper on who we should talk to, focusing on specific seniority-levels, industries, and lines-of-business (ex: Sales vs. Marketing). Leveraging iTracks, we followed 25 Salesforce users through a five-day work week to gather the specific day-to-day use cases they encountered.

In the meanwhile, we ran a supplemental survey with Salesforce Administrators to glean an additional perspective on these multi-cloud, multi-player use cases.

In addition, we ran a supplemental study with Salesforce Admins. Admins manage and setup Salesforce for end-users at their organization - note, the people we talked to in the Diary Study are end-users! We surveyed 110 Admins to learn about the multi-cloud, multi-player use cases they enable for their end-users.

Around the same time as our study, our internal Customer Success organization was running a series of focus groups into relevant topics. We sat in, gathering additional data.

Salesforce is a large company — we’re talking to customers all the time! Around the same time as our study, our internal Customer Success organization was running a series of focus groups with employees of a large Salesforce customer. These focus group participants were in the Sales and Service fields at that customer company, and were detailing their current experiences and future hopes for the Salesforce and Slack integration.

To deep-dive into the "why" and "how" in the use cases gathered so far, we followed up with 10 diary study participants in a series of 1:1 interviews.

While we had a list of use cases from the diary studies, we needed to further understand in detail the "why" and "how" behind these use cases. We followed up with 10 participants from the diary study in 60-min 1:1 blind interviews. Over Miro, we guided participants through each of the use cases they outlined by further detailing their individual goals, products involved, tools involved, key players, process check-points, challenges, opportunity areas, and more.

Deliverable #1: A Self-Serve Use-Case Library

A use-case library detailing all of the multi-cloud/multi-player use cases we heard about.

Deliverable #2: Current-state Experience Maps

Current-state experience maps highlighting five storylines that string together use cases.

Deliverable #3: Future-state "Starter Packs"

Future-state “Starter Packs” highlighting opportunity areas, How Might We statements, and participants’ ideas.

Here's a sneak peak into themes we gathered across the 30+ use cases.

Please reach out to cynthia_chen@berkeley.edu for more insights.

SAMPLE INSIGHT: SALESFORCE-ON-SLACK THEMES

Across all 25+ use cases, five key themes emerged when thinking about what our customers employ Salesforce and Slack to achieve for them (aka, what do they “hire” Salesforce and Slack to do?). At a high-level, Salesforce-on-Slack solutions should:

1/ Help users cut through the noise
2/ Help users identify and reach the right people
3/ Help users find what they need
4/ Help users consolidate work/information (sync info across tools and move people between tools)
5/ Help users optimize toward higher-value work

These 30+ use cases provided immediate impact to ongoing projects while also having a long-term shelf life for the Salesforce-on-Slack space.

With many stakeholders involved, the impacts of this research was able to span far and wide! Product Managers working on the new Salesforce Integrations for Slack Apps were able to adopt these insights into building features; other product teams were able to draw insights into future releases, such as for Slack Canvas and Slack Sales Elevate; product leaders were able to spot opportunities and be informed about the future strategy for this space.

This was an ambiguous study; here are some takeaways & challenges...

As researchers, we often need to understand complex spaces — so it's important to seek clarification.
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We didn’t always understand their use cases. Often, these use cases very industry or lines-of-business specific, but we combated this by running 1:1 interviews to ask for clarification/followup.
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It's exciting watching insights build on one another!
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I got to practice synthesizing large amounts of data, especially ones coming from various methods. It was exciting to see insights build on top of one another the further we went, and I made sure to keep organized with what we’d already learned.