One Chat to Rule them All, and in the Loudness Bind them
March 16, 2018
One Chat to Rule them All, and in the Loudness Bind them
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Slack
- We currently use slack at our organization for our main non-verbal internal communication.
- We've tried to mitigate our reliance on email internally as we used to see emails slung around without much thought. Now we just fire off a quick message.
- We have some remote employees communicate with Slack as a primary internal communication tool.
- Additionally we utilize a third-party chat solution for a product site that allows end-users to communicate with us via slack. They don't know they are talking to us via slack but the chat widget integrates with a specific Slack channel. Slack is flexible in this way.
- We use slack to send us reminders to follow-up with customers and leads by way of a scheduled notification/reminder from our internal custom CRM
- We will toss files back and forth at times when we need to share something quickly
Pros
- API Integrations
- 3rd Party Support
- File/Image support
- Mobile App works well
- Audio and Video Calls
- Text formatting and Code sharing (for developers)
- Notification Options
Cons
- Performance can be slow at times
- Using slack creates a reliance on it - like any social media, feeling that you may fall behind if you don't view it for a time
- It can be easy to miss messages if they're not directly addressed to you (which many users may forget, although this is hardly a fault of slack — they do their best to balance message notification configuration with options)
- I'm not sure how measurable it is to determine impact of a chat app on business.
- It does help us to maintain effective communication avenues between our office and remote employees.
- It helps us schedule easy reminders which can keep us accountable to our customer/lead follow-ups which definitely helps alleviate some stresses with customers.
I've used Discord which is a direct Slack competitor in tech/gaming communities and I have found both have strengths and weaknesses. Once I've gotten accustomed to certain text formatting features of Slack, I've found switching over to using Discord was sometimes disappointing when a formatting feature was absent. Slack has some nice code/syntax highlighting/sharing features which Discord does not have.
Slack Feature Ratings
Using Slack
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Feel confident using Familiar | Cumbersome |
- On-boarding users in our org
- Chatting - Formatting Text
- Configuring and customizing Slack is great and quite simple
- 3rd Party API integrations and webhooks are easy to integrate
- Switching between different Slack Groups can create slow loading times
- Threaded messages can be confusing to some users
Yes - The Slack Mobile App is fantastic. Every feature that I have seen on Desktop is pretty much represented on mobile. Some things like "reactions" are harder to access due to the requirement of having to press and hold on a message, but that is at least intuitive as a user experience. It works as expected and is relatively quick on my iPhone 7.
Comments
Please log in to join the conversation