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The past two years have seen businesses in every industry embrace digital-first strategies to better connect employees, customers, and partners. In tandem, new collaboration tools and remote working technologies have provided flexibility and choice around where and how we work.
However, the future of work is not just about technology — it’s about people and talent. Expectations around flexible work have changed, and many employees are looking for companies with flexible work options to give themselves a better work-life balance.
According to research from Future Forum and Slack, flexibility is no longer just about where we work — it’s also about when we work. The research found that 76% of employees indicated they want more location flexibility, while 93% said they wanted schedule flexibility.
Businesses without flexible work practices might be alarmed to learn that 57% of employees said they were open to looking for a new job in 2022, according to the Future Forum and Slack research. Beyond financial compensation, flexibility is the next selection criteria for employees when choosing a job.
At its core, the shift to flexible, hybrid working is about moving from an offline to an online environment. This impacts the places we share information, the way we communicate, how we resource teams, scheduling, and how we react to changing market conditions.
How to address these criteria and build a ‘Digital HQ’ was the subject of a recent webinar featuring experts at Salesforce, Tokopedia, and Slack. Titled ‘Salesforce + Slack: Your Digital HQ for Success from Anywhere’, the webinar asked this expert panel to share insights and advice on how businesses can create a single, unified platform that connects everyone — helping work flow and customer success grow.
When organisations take a Slack-first approach to collaboration across their functions, they help to enable real-time interaction. Add that to the power of Salesforce solutions and Customer 360, and it’s a win for both customers and employees. Businesses have never been able to respond, solve issues, or manage customers faster than they can now.
Imagine your sales, service, and marketing teams all with the ability to collaborate in real-time to solve issues for customers. This includes digital deal rooms, instant access to product experts, case swarming, and the ability to include agency partners.
Digital collaboration has also given some businesses the opportunity to say farewell to inefficient practices. With Slack, companies are discovering that not every issue has to be solved in a meeting. Instead, these issues have morphed into live threads on Slack where participants join in whenever they like and offer deeper levels of interaction to solve them.
Tokopedia is a technology company with the largest marketplace platform in Indonesia. The company recently merged with Southeast Asia’s leading mobile on-demand services and payments platform Gojek to form a holding company that is now the largest technology group in Indonesia, GoTo. Despite two different work cultures coming together, the process has been smooth. Both companies adopted Slack before the merger and shared a digital-first mindset that helped teams to blend effectively and collaborate remotely.
Tokopedia was already well into its digital transformation journey when the pandemic hit, so it was prepared for the switch to remote working. With more than 17,000 islands composing the country, serving Indonesia can be a logistical challenge for any company. Tokopedia used its digital readiness to tap new talent pools outside major cities to scale up its team — something that might not have been possible without the right digital tools.
For Tokopedia, its employees and sales teams are seen as brand ambassadors. The philosophy is to give the sales team an exceptional experience, so their enthusiasm and efficiency pass straight through to customers. To do this, sales teams are given access to VIP customer service channels through Slack. As they engage with customers, they can solve queries faster, be served with recommended next steps, and expertly manage all aspects of the relationship through Salesforce.
With Digital HQ and a digital-first mindset, companies are finding new benefits that rise out of this style of collaboration. Trust is critical for effective flexible working arrangements. Using tools and technology to hold each other accountable, through transparent processes and data, helps teams foster unity and trust in each other.
One aspect that sets Slack apart from other team collaboration tools, is that all the collective intelligence that gets shared on Slack remains accessible, like an encyclopaedia. That valuable knowledge doesn’t disappear over time or get lost in a never-ending feed of information. This means that teams can access the right information as and when they need it.
Businesses are finding creative new ways to use Salesforce and Slack to deliver exceptional experiences for customers. One large financial institution set up their customer issues on Slack as a visual swarm room, allowing their teams to monitor priorities and solve customer challenges more efficiently.
Meanwhile, a leading university used automation to improve retention and student course completion. New Slack channels were created with tutors and support staff with students if their marks dipped below passable levels, helping them to stay on track.
If your company is already on its digital transformation journey, watch the ‘Salesforce + Slack: Your Digital HQ for Success from Anywhere’ webinar to learn more about how you can equip your business with the tools it needs to operate effectively in today’s changed world of work.
