Bringing a more social touch to everyday business
June 12, 2020
Bringing a more social touch to everyday business
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Slack
We use Slack across the entire organization, within all departments. We were a very distributed team where collaboration with people around the world was a regular occurrence. A tool like Slack simplified communication within individual teams, but also allowed for easy communication across teams where, for instance, a customer support representative could contact an engineering team member to get some help or explanations. Slack was also integrated with a few other systems that allowed the centralized broadcast of information, such as tweets mentioning our products or the release of new software builds, where anyone who is interested could consume it.
- Provides great flexibility to structure your conversations and the information within (channels, 1 on 1, groups, threads). Being able to structure conversations makes it easier to find relevant information later and can allow the splitting of the casual and important.
- Ease of use. Slack is easy to get into and use while still offering many advanced options for those curious and adventurous enough to use them.
- Great potential for integration. Slack has many apps and integrations that allow easy access to other systems or to quickly share information across systems. By connecting multiple systems you can access a lot of data from a single place which can save time.
- The search feature could really be improved. It is quite difficult to find something specific with the search function as no matter the parameters and filters that you set, it seems to never return what you are looking for.
- The UI could use some help. The basics are there and easy to use, but Slack offers a ton of ways to customize the experience and this causes the setting screen to be a huge convoluted mess, but also switches and options can be found in numerous places. This makes it quite difficult when you are trying to find a specific option or need to know if it even exists.
- The Android mobile app (can't speak for iOS) can be buggy at times. Navigation sometimes doesn't work as expected and the read/unread status on the contact list can be erroneous. I mostly use it for after hours messaging so it's very light use and therefore not a big issue, but it could be annoying to a mobile-only workforce.
- In my experience, people tend to respond to chat messages faster than to emails, therefore Slack has helped accelerate day to day work due to the removal of long wait times from colleagues overseas and even local ones.
- Slack has fostered collaboration between teams and departments by eliminating barriers to communication. Team channels provide a place to ask questions without needing to know who exactly to ask them to, for instance.
- The usage of Slack has reduced some 1 on 1 live communication in our office; it does make the open plan office quieter, but live communication tends to be a better way to get information and share ideas.
The feature set of the chat capability in GoToMeeting is quite limited, fine for basic communication but not much else.
Discord is a fine tool for online communities, but the lack of control over the data and environment makes it a less than ideal business tool (if something is free, you're the product).
Microsoft Teams is a solid competitor whose sole advantage is how well it is integrated within the Office environment. From a chat only perspective, it is very similar to Slack, however if your business does a lot of collaboration on Office documents, Teams is better suited for such work than Slack (although the latter does provide integrations).
Discord is a fine tool for online communities, but the lack of control over the data and environment makes it a less than ideal business tool (if something is free, you're the product).
Microsoft Teams is a solid competitor whose sole advantage is how well it is integrated within the Office environment. From a chat only perspective, it is very similar to Slack, however if your business does a lot of collaboration on Office documents, Teams is better suited for such work than Slack (although the latter does provide integrations).
Do you think Slack delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Slack's feature set?
Yes
Did Slack live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Slack go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Slack again?
Yes
Slack Feature Ratings
Using Slack
25 - In my current company Slack is used by every employee in every department. This includes the executive team, Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Administration, Customer support and Product Management.
1 - My current company is quite small so we don't have a support organization. The only person providing support is the Slack Admin who also happens to be the CTO. The support of Slack requires very little effort as there are rarely any issues, the only requests are the occasional addition/removal of new and past employees, or the addition/removal of an app or integration. All of which requires minimal time from our CTO.
- Cross-team and cross-company communication. We are a remote-only company.
- Information storage. We have specific channels created where information on a given subject is shared with minimal conversation, which then serves as an easily accessible repository of information.
- Collaboration with freelancers. We often make use of freelancers so we invite them to a specific channel to simplify ongoing communication and can keep the information in our Slack instance for future reference.
- Our build pipeline outputs messages in a Slack channel so anyone can quickly see if there are any issues without needing to connect or look at the build environment.
- Depending on the other tools that we end up getting, we could connect them to Slack and provide updates/notifications to all that need them quite easily.
Using Slack
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Easy to use Technical support not required Quick to learn Feel confident using Familiar | Unnecessarily complex Not well integrated Inconsistent |
- Composing messages with the wysiwyg editor is very easy and seeing the visual impact before posting instead of markup code is nice.
- Being displayed a list of the people you most often chat to when you want to start a new conversation instead of an alphabetical list is very convenient.
- The search feature is cumbersome to use and rarely yields what I am looking for. The filtering options are not obvious and it's unclear how you can further refine your search results.
- There are numerous places where settings live and the settings section itself can be daunting. Finding what you are looking for or whether it's even available is difficult.
- It is not obvious to know which apps/integrations are available and how to use them.
Yes - The mobile apps are great for the most part, but suffer from the same issues as the desktop or web version. Another problem with the mobile apps is that the read/unread notifications in the contact view aren't always properly updated, sometimes they indicate unread messages even though the channel/user was visited.