Likelihood to Recommend You can tell from the CEO and all staff that this is a very competent company that wants you to succeed with integrity. There is a strong support and services team that works collaboratively with us to make sure we are always getting what we need. They provide 24x7 emergency support, online ticket support, email support, a client community, and the ability to call and talk to the same account manager or community consultant every time (I even have Mariano's skype and he replies on weekends!). They recently launched a client community - so they are now even practicing what they preach. Our questions in the client community are always answered quickly.
Read full review I think Slack works really well in office settings, or even for any group of people who need an easy way to communicate with each other through organized channels. It may not be the best for those who intend to use it as a social media type app, it is more geared towards business use.
Read full review Pros It's easy to use. The admin panel has a number of drag and drop options to modify the experience Flexibility. There are a large number of standard block features that can be added to areas. In addition, each dynamic block as a number of settings that allow you to tailor the experience you want to create. You can do this without being a programmer. Personalization. There are good tools that allow you to personalize the experience based on whether users are logged in or not, whether they are in particular segments (which we can create) or recommendations based on information the user has provided about themselves. Mobile. Small World Labs has a really great way of doing mobile. They give you a drag and drop interface for designing the mobile environment so there is a lot of flexibility with this. We are currently turning this module on. Read full review Automated Notifications: Integrated tools like Jira, Trello, and Google Drive to receive automated notifications and updates directly in Slack, improving visibility and efficiency within the team Message Encryption: Slack encrypts the messages in transit and at rest, ensuring the security and privacy of sensitive information and making our IT team's life much easier. Reminder Bots: We used Slackbot to set reminders, automate follow-up actions, and provided information based on user queries. SurveyMonkey Integration: Integrated our Slack with SurveyMonkey to distribute surveys and collect feedback from team members, streamlining the feedback-gathering process which was a huge support to our HR and Admin team. Read full review Cons Integration with our Association Management System (AMS) didn't go as smoothly as I had wished. Having said that all of the issues with that integration have been addressed. Because the platform is updated so frequently you need to stay on top of what is available to you and your end users or you may miss out on key functionality releases. Read full review The only thing I can think of is that it is easy to create too many channels. This has more to do with the team using Slack and less to do with Slack itself. maybe some direction on Slack's part on how best to utilize channels would be helpful. Read full review Likelihood to Renew From the first conversation and beyond, it has been a pleasure working with Small World Labs. Their staff are genuinely interested in understanding our business and our goals, and actively make recommendation on continued improvement and long-term strategy. All of their staff demonstrate a clear understanding of the product and when to expect new features. Furthermore, their CEO, Michael Wilson, is more than competent and has proven to be an industry expert. He understands both the technical side and the community strategy side of the business. In fact, we have already initiated a project to build a second community with Small World Labs for a separate business unit
Read full review As useful as Slack has become within our company, I feel fairly confident we will continue to use Slack as a communication tool. They continue to improve their software and add value to its use within our office. Customer service delivers, which is an absolute must. Looking forward to how they improve.
Read full review Usability There are a multitude of options to configure the exact user experience you want and what you want to emphasize.
Read full review As long as you use the basic chat features and nothing more, it really is super easy to understand and use. Once you want to take advantage of some of the more advanced features and capabilities, that's when things get complicated. Anyone who has use SMS or a chat program before will be able to figure out the basics though, so rolling this out should be relatively straightforward and not required exhaustive training. Teaching chat etiquette is something else though.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Uptime has never been an issue.
Read full review Performance Speed is not an issue.
Read full review Support Rating The people at Small World Labs are very accessible. I can email, open a ticket, or call and they are there. I'd also point out that senior management is quite available too. We frequently have talks about potential strategies and new things we might be doing, which is great. I think the whole organization genuinely likes what they do and likes helping us succeed.
Read full review I've never had to contact support for Slack which is a great testament to its ease and use. Adding people outside of the organization takes a little getting used to, but ultimately allows for greater collaboration between FTE and contractors. There is no clear alternative to this software, so it's the best we can do for now.
Read full review In-Person Training In-person training is more ad-hoc based on if they are traveling to you or you are going to visit them. I imagine that if I paid for in-person training that it would be set up as well, but I've just used the standard training that comes with the initial set up and ongoing support.
Read full review Online Training Online training is through online webinar & how-to posts and videos in the client community.
Read full review Implementation Rating We had staff turnover at our own organization during the implementation. We were able to get the community up and live in a good timeframe even though that happened and we had to switch some people around for managing the project on our side.
Read full review It always helps if you communicate to everyone in the organization how important it is to drop whatever other chat tools they are using and jump quickly to Slack. They will all fall in love with it.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We evaluated a few different community platform vendors over the course of a couple of months. I believe we also evaluated Jive, Lithium, KickApps, and Powered.
Read full review Slack is the superior offering for what we do and who we communicate with. The other programs offer basic features, but Slack continues to innovate and is business-first, which is very helpful for our small team. The feature set and integrations are better in Slack than other offerings we have evaluated
Read full review Return on Investment Our community has been very active since the re-launch of our site. Have seen some increases in member engagement. Feedback from our membership has been nothing but positive since we transitioned off of our older Sharepoint community. Look and feel and ease of use have been real pluses for our members. Having the Small World Labs community is allowing us to be more creative with the way we integrate our community into all aspects of our online presence, web-site, social media, etc. Read full review We have a story when one guy mentioned in a our site group with tag @here about his wedding, he didnt know that @here works only for people who are online, so most of the people missed the message, slack is not the best place to update about the important things Slack helps to solve and be updated if you have an internal problems and you want to know how the solving goes Read full review ScreenShots CommUnity by Personify Screenshots