- Slack usage has swelled as a result of an increase in remote work over the past month due to the coronavirus. The company added 7,000 new paid customers since February.
- Slack's VP of customer experience, Ali Rayl, is on the frontlines, handling even more inquiries from customers than ever.
- Rayl said Slack sees an opportunity to share its knowledge about new ways of working: Her team is offering more 1:1 consultations for new customers than ever before.
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Slack has been one of the beneficiaries of an increase in remote work over the past month, as more companies ask employees to work from home to limit the spread of the coronavirus disease, COVID-19.
Last week, the workplace chat company said it added 7,000 paid customers since February, more in less than two months than it added in either of the previous two quarters. Meanwhile, Slack has also offered organizations working on coronavirus response the option to upgrade to a paid plan for free.
All that means that Slack has been busier than ever not only signing up new customers, but helping both new and old users understand how to use the app effectively.
Ali Rayl, Slack's VP of customer experience, is at the frontlines. Her team handles everything related to keeping customers happy, including user education initiatives like guides and tutorials and answering questions on Twitter. Typically, customers would come to her team with curiosity about how they could use Slack most effectively, but in the last few weeks, she's seen a shift: Now customers are coming to Slack out of need.
"People are feeling an existential need, their businesses are struggling, they don't know how to keep things going," Rayl told Business Insider. "They're suddenly under a lot of pressure to figure this out."
While Slack wasn't started with the explicit goal of enabling remote work, it's product is well-positioned for this moment. As companies try to keep operating as usual while employees are working from home, they're increasingly relying on tools like Slack, Zoom, Dropbox, Cisco's WebEx, Microsoft Teams and other cloud software to adapt.
Peeling back Slack's layers
In the past few weeks, Rayl's team has stepped up its number of one-on-one consultations with new or existing customers that are looking for personalized help on how to use Slack.
Typically, customers contact her team for a consultation within 30 days of starting to use Slack. In the past few weeks, as counties and states have enacted shelter in place orders forcing people to work from home, she's seen a rise in interest in those consultations. Some of those are new customers that have shown up in the last week, some are users of the free app converting to a paid plan, and others are paid customers who are now expanding usage of Slack within their organization, Rayl said.
There are a couple of types of questions her team typically gets. New customers often ask questions about how Slack can keep employees engaged or allow people to stay connected with coworkers. Rayl's team also gets more technical questions, like how exactly they can use Slack for things like keeping projects on track.
Her team also draws on its own experience of working with people in various offices, across time zones. She said, for many people even the idea of using something like Slack is new, regardless of the remote work aspect, and that's what her teams tries to help customers with.
"As you peel back the layers, you're like, 'Oh yeah, this is actually a super complex way to collaborate with your coworkers.' There's a lot of nuance and layering in here," Rayl said. "So you help them get set up with just the very basic structure of these containers for conversations."
Typically those consults happen over Zoom. Rayl said that while it's not Slack's intention to get its customers interested in using Zoom, doing the consultation shows them how well both products work together.
"We have a good relationship with Zoom," Rayl said. "We've worked together to make sure that it is really seamless."
Zoom is just one of the outside applications Slack can connect to: It offers integrations with over 2,000 third party applications.
The rise in remote work is also benefiting Slack's larger rival Microsoft Teams, which also gave a customer update last week. It said it added 12 million daily active users in a single week, bringing the total to 44 million. Ultimately, the coronavrius crisis is increasing the competition between the two services.
Rayl said one of the things her team does is help explain what Slack can be used for, so customers who may not be sure which tool they want to use have an easier time making that decision. She argues that Slack and Teams offer customers very different tools.
"If a customer is looking for a way to use video conferencing - basically a new layer on top of SharePoint and a window to do their collaborative Office 365 document editing - then Teams is totally the tool for that," she said. "But if a company is looking for an actual communications platform - a collaborations platform - that's not exactly what Teams is, that's what Slack is."
Inquiries from non-profits
Another thing that's kept Rayl's team busy lately is handling an influx of interest from nonprofits who want the free upgrade to a paid version of Slack's product. Slack is offering that to organizations working on coronavirus research, response, or mitigation and local media organizations and scientific publications covering those the coronavirus.
Rayl said that most people who have inquired about the free upgrade generally get it. Right now, the main thing Slack wants to do is help those who are in need of a communication and collaboration tool to help fight the coronavirus.
They do check for basic things like seeing if the person works for a government organization or non-profit, but they're not making people go through a formal vetting process. They can just email covid@slack.com.
"There's no benefit to the world in us getting too picky about vetting those," she said. "Our product is really good in this moment, our product can really help and I think it's incumbent on us to put it in the hands of as many people as possible."
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