Item: Slack
Rating: 10
Author: Anubhav Goyal

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

1. Office day-to-day communication --> find it more useful and trackable than emails. 2. Work-life balance --> certain features like snooze, setting work hours, updating current status helps ensure that work life balance is maintained. 3. On-boarding of new members --> since all conversations are stored, it makes it easier for new joiners to get context of things that happened in the organization before they joined.

Pros and Cons

Schedule messages --> In order to promote work-life balance, we can schedule messages such that they reach the recipient's inbox during the office hours
Entire conversation --> A new joiner to a channel has access to all the previous conversation, making it easy for Knowledge Transfer
Snooze notification option --> This is really helpful so that individuals don't get disturbed during the off-time or when they are in meetings/doing some important work

Ability to add images/videos in line and not as attachments --> makes it easier to make messages more engaging
Slack daily use report --> help users know how much time is spent on slack daily (digital/screen fatigue)
New reactions :D

Most Important Features

Channels - different groups for different teams, purposes
Huddle - easily and quickly get on an audio call and share screen to discuss
Schedule message - send messages wrt recipients working hours

Return on Investment

Higher employee productivity
Quicker context setting

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Teams and Google Chat

Slack is more easy to set up and get used and has added functionalities as compared to the other two.

Added functionalities of scheduling messages, huddle.

The Google Chat interface and platform wasn't as intuitive as Slack

The pricing was in favour of Slack over the options we considered - MS Team and Google Chat

Key Insights

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

Other Software Used

Intercom, Figma, Jira Software

Likelihood to Recommend

1. Well suited for office communication --> messages, voice call, video calls, screen share with annotate makes it the go-to-office tool.
2. You want to respect employee's personal space --> Office communication should not interfere with personal life. With Slack it's easy to do so as your WhatsApp is free from office communications, task and other things.
3. New joiner onboarding --> new joiners can go through previous communication. Makes it easy for knowledge transfer

Best Office Communication Tool

Overall Satisfaction with Slack