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How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack
How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack
Table of contents
Introduction 3
Save time and money by reducing meetings 5
Collaborate in real time with Slack 7
Cut the costs and risks of email 9
Communicate securely with Slack 11
Engage employees to maximize productivity 15
Empower your workforce with Slack 16
Improve the customer experience by increasing collaboration 19
Offer premium customer service with Slack 20
Discover what Slack can do for you 22
2
How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack Introduction
Introduction
Love it or hate it, remote work has become Instead of copy-and-pasted office behavior,
a major part of the business landscape in the Slack offers a new paradigm for collaboration
past year, and it’s not going anywhere. that’s native to the digital workplace. And the
More than 80% of business leaders surveyed bottom-line benefits can’t be ignored.
by Gartner plan to have at least a
partially remote workforce moving forward. A commissioned study conducted by
Forrester Consulting on behalf of Slack
That puts the pressure on chief information zeroed in on these benefits for teams
officers (CIOs) to solve not only the technical that switched to Slack from email and
problems of the company—security, chat. Moving away from these siloed
compliance, efficiency—but also the human communication methods led to substantial—
problems that face a distributed workforce. and measurable—gains in productivity.
Our new remote reality makes collaboration
tools more important than ever before. These In its report, “The Total Economic Impact of
tools are the employee experience now, and Slack,” Forrester found that technical teams
affect everything from culture and employee that use Slack see a 3x return on investment
engagement to operating costs and overall, as well as more specific benefits on
customer loyalty. the front lines.
That’s why 58% of CIOs cite implementing For example, 87% of organizations saw
digital collaboration and workplace tools as improved developer productivity within their
one of their top 5 priorities for 2020. team, and 88% reported an increase in their
company’s ability to adapt to change.
This is where digital transformation comes
in—for many IT leaders, the traditional tools Faster decision-making, better employee
just aren’t working anymore. experience, and more efficient business
processes are just a few of the advantages
The term “transformation” here is deliberate. that come with a transformed approach
We can’t just move traditional work to collaboration.
behaviors online and expect better results.
Meetings held via video conferencing are still Let’s take a deeper look at why our
inefficient. One-to-one conversations that businesses need this paradigm shift now
take place on chat still obscure the flow more than ever—and how Slack is reinventing
of information. work across industries.
3
How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack Introduction
31%
reduction
23% in ticket
338% faster time resolution
ROI to market time
Source: "The Total Economic Impact of Slack," Forrester
Source: "The Business Value of Slack," IDC
4How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack Save time and money by reducing meetings
Save time and money by
reducing meetings
Meetings are staples of the knowledge For too long, this has been business as usual.
worker experience, but are they the most But with the increased pressure to
effective way to collaborate? The majority cut costs while increasing output in light
of professionals say no. Sixty-two percent of the recession, this mode of operation is
of workers cite wasteful meetings as the not sustainable.
number-one barrier to getting work done.
To
Toestimate
estimatethethedirect cost
direct of aofsingle
cost meeting,
a single meeting,
simply multiply the meeting time by the hourly
simply multiply the meeting time by the hourly
rate of the attendees
rate of the attendees
Example
Example
30-minute meeting (0.50 hours)
30-minute meeting (0.50 hours)
1 $50/hour 2 $50/hour 3 $70/hour
1 $50/hour 2 $50/hour 3 $70/hour
($50+$50+$70) x 0.50 = $85 Cost per meeting
($50+$50+$70) x 0.50 = $85 Cost per meeting
Participant’s fully burdened hourly rate
Participant’s fully burdened hourly rate
5How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack Save time and money by reducing meetings
Wasted time due to meetings is estimated This is consistent with a study by the Harvard
to cost more than $399 billion annually in Business Review. It found that one company
the U.S. alone. That number seems too big to spent 300,000 hours a year
be true until you consider that professionals on one weekly executive meeting. This
spend an average of 2 hours one status meeting needed 162 meetings
a week in meetings they call a waste of to support it and involved the efforts of
their time. hundreds of workers.
Don’t underestimate the impact of cutting So if you’re looking for a place to start
even just one regular meeting. In the trimming costs, look no further than your
commissioned report “The Total Economic calendar. Conference room or conference
Impact of Slack,” Forrester found that for call, it makes no difference—there’s a better,
one company “eliminating a single executive more cost-effective way to collaborate.
status meeting had a trickle-down effect of
then eliminating status meetings at
each branch and level of the organization
that supported that single executive
status meeting.”
37%
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consider unnecessary
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6How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack Save time and money by reducing meetings
Collaborate in
real time with Slack
The best meetings give you the information “Slack is like an ongoing meeting,” says
you need to do your job. They clarify next Matthew Taylor, an editorial project manager
steps and facilitate productive collaboration at The Times (UK). “You stop in for the
between different roles and teams. portions that are important to you and leave
the room when you’re done, free to come
Slack provides those same benefits in real time. and go as you please. If someone needs you,
they’ll call you into the room.”
With Slack, communication is organized
into channels, which are organized around Information-sharing, collaboration and
teams (#sales), projects (#v2.3-deployment) decision-making all happen within these
or topics (#incident-management). Channel- virtual rooms where the conversation is
based messaging puts the right information, archived and searchable. No more digging
updates and people at your fingertips through minutes or sending follow-up emails.
whenever you need them. No more daily standups and status check-ins.
With Slack, managers can keep their finger
Instead of spending thousands of hours
on the pulse of a project with asynchronous
gathering updates and information from
updates that save time and better align the
various team members, everyone involved
team around goals and timelines.
in a project collaborates directly within the
appropriate channel.
7How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack Save time and money by reducing meetings
“One company noted “Companies using Slack have
that eliminating a single 23% fewer meetings than other
executive status meeting companies.”
had a trickle-down Source: “The Business Value of Slack,” IDC
effect of then eliminating
status meetings at
each branch and level
of the organization that
supported that single
executive status meeting.”
Source: “The Total Economic Impact
of Slack,” Forrester
No surprise, then, that in a research
study sponsored by Slack, IDC found that
companies using Slack have 23% fewer
meetings than other companies. For the
company we mentioned earlier, that would be
a time savings of 69,000 hours.
As just one example of many: When the
digital development team at Britain’s
longest-standing national daily newspaper,
The Times, switched to using Slack for all
team-wide communication (and collaboration
with choice members of other teams), they
were able to cut the number of team check-in
and project status meetings by nearly
two-thirds.
8How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack Cut the costs and risks of email
Cut the costs and
risks of email
Professionals spend more time in the inbox
than they do in the conference room—an
estimated 3+ hours a day on average. That’s Common causes of
over 37% of the workweek responding to email inefficiency
and deleting emails.
For a single employee with an hourly rate of $50,
email costs $750 a week.
Project Status updates
information take time
and updates to write
These estimates don’t even account for the scattered and review
time it takes to resume productive work across inboxes
after checking your email. According to a
famous study by professor Gloria Mark of
the University of California, Irvine, it takes
23 minutes and 15 seconds to reclaim your
focus after an interruption (such as checking Action items Critical
your email). take time information
to identify is lost in
Email is fundamentally inefficient, and that’s cluttered
the problem. Most organizations rely on it, inboxes
but it’s riddled with bottlenecks, delays and
communication pitfalls.
Worse, email presents a major security
vulnerability.
Key Conversations
stakeholders can’t happen
not always in real time
copied
9How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack Cut the costs and risks of email
We need a new way of communicating—
The hidden costs of email one that’s secure and cost-effective.
90% Communicate securely
of data breaches with Slack
caused by phishing
Prior to choosing Slack for its digital
$3.86M workplace initiative, leading U.S. retail trading
Average cost of data breach company TD Ameritrade relied primarily
on email to share information throughout its
$12B corporate workforce and branch network.
In this environment, employees’ access to
Lost to business email scams
information depended on who they knew and
each year
how well they knew the organization.
Source: Security awareness training explosion,
2017 FBI report: global BEC losses exceeded
US$12 Billion in 2016, 2018
This was a problem. TD Ameritrade wanted
a digital workplace where anyone in the
organization could get the information they
needed to do their job at the time they
Even with expensive security software, needed it.
there’s no program that can eliminate
Slack channels allowed them to cut through
human error completely. Sophisticated
these information silos by making company
phishing attacks catch even savvy users,
knowledge available across the organization.
and many employees don’t have the training
to recognize potentially harmful emails. It’s “By moving communication to public
difficult to verify senders, and even firewalls channels, we removed the subjectivity of
don’t catch everything. sharing information, so internal knowledge
could scale as needed,” says Neal
90% of data breaches are caused by
Obermeyer, a senior manager of internal
phishing—and the average cost of each data
communications, channel effectiveness and
breach is $3.86 million. These risks drive the
the digital workplace at TD Ameritrade.
cost of email far beyond productivity lost.
The net result? TD Ameritrade cut email
These vulnerabilities have only been
usage by 30% within six months of launching
exacerbated as employees are now working
Slack companywide. Email usage has
from home en masse. Many work from
continued to decline since.
personal computers and home networks,
which lack added security layers and the
oversight of in-office devices.
10How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack Cut the costs and risks of email
“Slack has become the In fact, Forrester found that the added
productivity companies experience from
backbone for facilitating reducing email and meetings averages $2.1
secure collaboration and million over three years.
social connection across
our enterprise. We’ve seen Slack reduces email volume by an average of 32%
a significant reduction in Source: “The Business Value of Slack,” IDC
email usage, and teams
are communicating more That doesn’t even take into account the value
effectively.” of increased security that Slack provides over
email. Slack’s enterprise-grade security and
Vijay Sankara compliance standards protect your internal
CIO, TD Ameritrade communications while moving the bulk of
your team communication to a secured,
monitored environment.
Let’s put this in perspective. Take the average
employee time spent on email every day And with Slack Connect, you have that
(three hours) and multiply that by 10,000 same security, speed and transparency with
employees. That’s an average of 30,000 external communications.
company hours spent on email every day—
and 9,000 hours a day saved just by moving
to Slack!
3 hours on email daily x 10,000 employees =
30,000 company hours spent on email daily
11How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack Cut the costs and risks of email
Slack Connect allows you to create a secure “As someone that’s been doing
Slack channel for trusted partners, vendors
and customers. You’re in complete control security for about 15 years,
of all external Slack channels. Identities must I’m not going to say I don’t
be verified before a user is allowed access
to your external Slack channel, and admins like email. It’s just, we use it
on both sides must approve all requests. In because we’re so used to it.
addition, admins have full permissions and
monitoring control over all communications. Whereas with Slack Connect,
you’re in an environment where
By moving the bulk of your communication
to a secure channel with verified senders, you’re in control. You can
you dramatically reduce your organization’s review and audit interactions
exposure to phishing and spam—while at the
same time supercharging collaboration. happening with the information
By moving the bulk of your communication
and all the files are also secured
to a secured channel with verified senders, within your environment.”
you dramatically reduce your organization’s
Ty Sbano
exposure to phishing and spam—while at the Chief security and trust officer, Sisense
same time supercharging collaboration.
12How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack Cut the costs and risks of email
Next
Nextstep:
step: calculate theimpact
calculate the impact
of of email
email
onyour
on your organization
organization
Calculate weekly time spent on email
Calculate weekly time spent on email
Average weekly
(Number of employees) x 3 × 5 = time Average weekly
spent on email
(Number of employees) x 3 × 5 = time spent on email
Calculate potential time savings from using Slack
Calculate potential time savings from using Slack
Time savings
(Average weekly time on email) x 0.23 = from Slack
Time savings
(Average weekly time on email) x 0.23 = from Slack
Calculate average weekly cost of email use
Calculate average weekly cost of email use
(Average fully burdened hourly rate) Average weekly
x (Average weekly time on email) = cost of email
(Average fully burdened hourly rate) Average weekly
x (Average weekly time on email) = cost of email
Calculate potential email cost savings from using Slack
(Time savings from Slack) Cost savings
Calculate potential email cost savings from using Slack
x (Average fully burdened hourly rate) = estimate
(Time savings from Slack) Cost savings
x (Average fully burdened hourly rate) = estimate
13How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack Engage employees to maximize productivity
Engage employees to
maximize productivity
85% of employees are disengaged at work Companies that ranked in Gallup’s top
—which means their minds are wandering, quartile of employee engagement saw
their feet are dragging, and their résumé is 23% more profitability than those in the
ready for new opportunities. bottom quartile. The companies also saw
significant reductions in turnover rates in
This isn’t an issue for managers alone. It’s both high- and low-turnover industries.
a systemic problem that costs companies
billions of dollars every year. According to This data gives us a strong “carrot and stick”
Gallup, disengaged employees cost the U.S. scenario when it comes to engagement:
$483 billion to $605 billion each year in lost Engaged employees work harder and are less
productivity alone. likely to leave. Disengaged employees siphon
company resources and eventually cost you
That’s not even counting the costs of in turnover as well.
turnover. On average, the cost to replace an
employee is roughly 50% of that employee’s Employee engagement isn’t just for
salary. For enterprises with thousands of companies that want good press—it’s
employees, those costs add up quickly. essential to running a profitable business.
And while this may seem like HR’s territory,
Engaged employees, on the other hand, have the shift toward remote work has made
been shown to not only cut these costs but to this an IT problem as well. The right
actually boost their company’s bottom line. software is key to creating an engaging
digital work environment.
As a hypothetical example, let’s take a software
company with 5,000 employees. The average
{Number of employees} x
annual turnover rate in tech* is 13.2%, and the
{average annual turnover rate} x
average salary is around $100,000.
[{Average salary} x 0.50] =
average yearly cost of turnover in your organization
In this scenario, you’re looking at 660 employees
churning every year, with associated costs totaling
an average of $33 million.
Source: “These 3 Industries Have the Highest
Talent Turnover Rates,” LinkedIn
14How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack Engage employees to maximize productivity
Empower your With employees’ easier access to information,
Kakuichi saw decision-making accelerated to
workforce with Slack four times the previous speed.
Three factors have proved time and again to This kind of open communication also
raise employee satisfaction and engagement: helps employees feel more connected at
ownership, recognition and connection. work. Slack creates a virtual office where
employees can interact with the company in
Slack helps companies build work cultures both formal and informal ways, even without
that support these engagement factors. In a physical office.
fact, Slack users are 10% more satisfied with
their workplace than non-Slack users.
To make good decisions and own its
work, employees need access to the right
information and people. A person can’t
experience ownership when they must
constantly rely on managers, peers or
Ownership
IT to provide them with information and
Employees want more
permissions. Slack empowers employees control over their work.
by decentralizing information and opening
access to project stakeholders.
Kakuichi, a Japanese manufacturing
enterprise, used Slack to revolutionize
internal communication—and consequently Recognition
its entire organization. Before Slack, Employees want to see
Kakuichi’s communication style was purely their hard work appreciated
one-to-one. The company relied on email, and rewarded.
phone, fax or face-to-face conversations.
The broader company wasn’t a part of these
conversations.
The shift to Slack’s one-to-all communication
Connection
style made a major difference as information Employees want to
and conversations were opened to the whole feel like part of a team
company. and a mission.
“With Slack, our employees have gone from
just passively taking in data to proactively
sharing interesting and helpful information,”
says Riu Tanaka, the representative director,
president and CEO at Kakuichi Co., Ltd.
15How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack Engage employees to maximize productivity
For popular CRM provider HubSpot, Slack
has been critical in building a world-class
“Slack is a technology that
work culture. HubSpot leverages employee helps us fill that gap, virtually
resource channels to foster community and
to remove barriers between departments,
and globally, to make sure
locations and roles. we’re removing any lack of
“Slack is a technology that helps us fill that transparency throughout the
gap, virtually and globally, to make sure organization and delivering on
we’re removing any lack of transparency
throughout the organization and delivering our [culture] promise.”
on our [culture] promise,” says Katie Burke, Katie Burke
HubSpot’s Chief People Officer. Chief people officer, HubSpot
HubSpot isn’t alone. Our Future of Work
study found that 88% of Slack users believe
that Slack keeps them connected to
coworkers, while 87% say that Slack has a
positive impact on work relationships.
The transparent nature of Slack makes it far
easier to track employee contributions and
publicly recognize achievements. People
who feel like their ideas, suggestions and
contributions matter are far more likely to feel
engaged and motivated at work.
Kakuichi leverages a Slack integration, Cvent, the industry-leading meetings,
Unipos, a peer-to-peer bonus application, so events and hospitality technology provider,
that employees can send points and public uses Slack to foster a culture of success
recognition to their colleagues. throughout their organization. In its Slack
channel #sales-successes, team members
This kind of public recognition helps share day-to-day wins, which are seen and
people—regardless of organization, role celebrated by coworkers and executives alike.
or industry—stay motivated to do their
best work, and to better appreciate the
contributions of others.
16How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack Engage employees to maximize productivity
The effects of Slack on employee
engagement go beyond existing employees.
Slack users are 10% more
Slack is now viewed as a key factor for 70% satisfied with their workplace
of workers when evaluating a job offer.
For context, this means that Slack availability
than non-Slack users.
is seen as a more important benefit than a Source: “The Future of Work,” Slack
fitness stipend (62%), catered lunches (59%)
or weekly happy hours (57%).
A connected workplace is a more human
and engaging workplace. Slack gives you the
tools you need to build a culture that engages
your workforce—and delivers the bottom-
line benefits of satisfied employees.
17How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack Improve the customer experience by increasing collaboration
Improve the customer
experience by increasing
collaboration
Expectations for customer service are higher 80% of customers say their
than ever—in fact, 80% of customers say
their experience with a company is just as experience with a company
important as the company’s products and is just as important as the
services.
company’s products and
This translates to new pressures for
businesses. In a survey by IDC, 62% of services.
business leaders admitted that “consumer Source: “State of the Connected Customer,” Salesforce
expectations are way ahead of our company’s
ability to change.”
One of the barriers to meeting these But when your teams work in software and
customer expectations is relatively easy to communication silos, it’s almost impossible
remedy and yet often overlooked: internal to meet these high service expectations.
communication. And these silos are common at most
enterprise companies.
When internal communication is subpar, so is
the customer experience. If your teams aren’t One survey found that teams use 5.6
collaborating effectively, you’ll have slower different project collaboration tools on
responses, longer issue resolution times, and average—which often leads to inefficient
more back-and-forth with customers. workflows and data organization between all
these different tools. Worse, a quarter of the
For this reason, 71% of customers expect survey respondents said that no one uses the
your various service teams to collaborate so same tools across teams at their company.
that they don’t have to repeat themselves or
get passed from team to team. When customer touchpoint teams have their
objectives, data and tools aligned, they can
This doesn’t just affect your customers— deliver exceptional experiences at every
73% of sales leaders identify collaboration step of the customer journey. To achieve this
between sales, marketing and customer goal, you must bring your teams together in
service as critical to revenue growth. a single platform, where internal and external
workflows can be streamlined.
18How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack Improve the customer experience by increasing collaboration
“One of the channels that I 71% of customers expect
find most valuable is account your various service teams to
management and engineering. collaborate so that they don’t
It’s the fastest means to have to repeat themselves or
escalation because there are get passed from team to team.
two assigned on-call engineers. Source: “Zendesk Customer Experience
You’re able to message within Trends Report 2020”
that channel whatever the
troubleshooting is that you need Rideshare platform Lyft and ground
transportation solution provider Lyft uses
for a customer. It’s instantaneous a Zendesk integration within Slack to
support from engineering that immediately escalate emergency or urgent
issues, thanks to the cross-functional team
could otherwise take 12 members who are part of the Lyft Business
to 24 hours.” Slack group.
Samantha Lutz When urgent situations arise for Lyft
Senior field account manager, Lyft Business Business, swift situation management is
essential. Slack provides the team with an
immediate escalation route while keeping
Offer premium customer all account stakeholders informed of what’s
being done to resolve the problem.
service with Slack
Other businesses are offering premium
Slack reaches across team borders to services for customers using dedicated Slack
rally your workers around the customer channels, with Slack Connect. Fastly, an
experience. The visibility and access that edge cloud platform, offers a dedicated Slack
channels offer empowers teams to tackle channel to its enterprise customers.
issues quickly and productively.
Customers can @mention a specific Fastly
The impact on customer service speaks for team member or type @support in their Slack
itself. Support teams that use Slack see a 31% channel to draw attention to an issue. The
average reduction in ticket resolution time. team then works within the channel to solve
They achieve this through integrations with the issue quickly and transparently.
critical software, easy access to experts and
fast escalation workflows.
19How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack Improve the customer experience by increasing collaboration
“Whether it’s debugging with our engineering Support teams see a 31%
group or identifying an issue with the
network or platform, the customer is able average reduction in ticket
to see all of these other folks joining in near resolution time when using
real time to help solve the issue, so it feels
more collaborative,” says Kim Ogletree, the Slack.
VP of customer success at Fastly. Source: “The Business Value of Slack,” IDC
Slack Connect isn’t just helpful for resolving
issues in real time. Smartcare, an audiology
platform and billing service, communicates “When our customers are
with customers exclusively in Slack Connect.
For Smartcare, this was key to positioning communicating to us through
itself as a premium service. Slack, they see us as real,
“What premium service looked like to us genuine people, and it has a
was changing the narrative away from email
into something categorically different,” says
totally different feel than email
Skylar Topham, Smartcare’s co-founder does. We want our customers
and CEO.
to feel like we’re on their team.”
Smartcare uses Slack to onboard Travis Topham
customers, provide technical support, Co-founder and head of product, Smartcare
streamline insurance billing and build strong
relationships with its customers.
“When our customers are communicating to
us through Slack, they see us as real, genuine
people, and it has a totally different feel
than email does,” says Travis Topham, the
co-founder and head of product at
Smartcare. “We want our customers to feel
like we’re on their team.”
Companies like Lyft, Fastly and Smartcare
are able to offer their customers top-tier
service because they made cross-functional
collaboration a priority for the entire
company. Slack’s powerful suite of internal-
and external-facing tools facilitates this
collaboration, so you can provide a customer
experience that exceeds expectations.
20How to achieve a 3x ROI with Slack Discover what Slack can do for you
Discover what Slack
can do for you
Expectations for IT are high, from customers
and employees alike—and our fast-changing
landscape of work comes with a lot of
challenges. But companies that are willing to
meet these demands and transform the way
they do business will reap the rewards.
There’s no room for business as usual in the
future of work. Let Slack help you reimagine
the way you collaborate. Together we can
start building a more profitable, more human
workplace today. For more information on
how to get acquainted with Slack, contact
our sales team today.
21About Slack Slack makes work simpler, more pleasant From FTSE 100 companies to corner shops, and more productive. It’s a channel-based millions of people around the world use Slack messaging platform for enterprise that to connect their teams, unify their systems brings the right people, information and tools and drive their business forward. together to get work done. The preceding information is intended for informational purposes only, and not as a binding commitment. Please do not rely on this information in making your purchasing decisions. The development, release and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of Slack and are subject to change.
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