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Enterprise software company Salesforce today announced the launch of a toolkit to help developers access key functionalities from their Salesforce instance – actions, automations and business insights – within Slack.
At the ongoing TrailblazerDX conference, the companies debuted the Salesforce Platform for Slack, providing developers a set of low-code tools to build custom Slack apps that can pull Salesforce functionalities. The apps cover the entirety of the Salesforce Customer 360 portfolio and enable teams to use their Salesforce data and metadata in real time and collaborate quickly on chat to make decisions – without requiring any middleware.
“With these apps, organizations can leverage Salesforce’s comprehensive system of record, business insights, powerful tools, and deep platform capabilities right from where people are already working together in Slack. We’re closing the gap between the data about your business and the teams working on the business. That’s the power of Slack and Salesforce together,” Patrick Stokes, executive vice president and GM of platform at Salesforce, told VentureBeat.
“For example, at Procore, a software platform for the construction industry, the sales team no longer has to toggle between Slack and Salesforce to find key information about a prospect. Instead, account executives can access Salesforce data directly within Slack, reducing context switching so reps can spend more time selling,” he explained.
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To get developers started, Salesforce is making multiple Slack apps (built using its toolkit) available in beta. The apps target service, sales and marketing areas, automating and simplifying access to key functions such as notifying sales teams of new leads, sending deal/account status updates and assigning service request cases as they come in.
What’s on the backend?
The Salesforce Platform for Slack, available as the latest addition to the Salesforce platform, contains two key tools: Apex and Flow. The former enables developers to build the custom apps by infusing Slack with required Salesforce data while the latter handles the job of automation by creating Slack-first workflows (like sending account status or creating channels for service requests) with full support for the data and actions infused.
“A developer might want to build a shortcut in Slack that looks up customer usage data and displays an account team channel. For this, they can build a simple app that uses a Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL) query to collect the data of interest and display it in Slack. The Apex SDK takes care of all of the underlying plumbing, including converting Salesforce Lightning UI into Slack’s native Block Kit, so you can just focus on your business logic,” Stokes said.
In case the team is already working with certain Salesforce apps, developers can use the Apex SDK to extend those apps directly to Slack. Flow can also be used to build multistep, guided workflows in Salesforce that can be reused within Slack with a few clicks.
The launch of Salesforce Platform for Slack comes as multiple players continue to build integrations to bring CRMs onto Slack and other business communication platforms. Just recently, San Francisco-based Rattle, which allows enterprises to make any custom object or field from its Salesforce, Jira, or Hubspot instance accessible inside Slack/Microsoft Teams, raised $26 million in series A funding. However, Stokes emphasized that this is a native integration that is simpler and far more seamless.
“This means you can replace the manual work with automated processes that [can] help teams avoid redundancy [and] increase data consistency and efficiency by reducing the amount of manual data sharing. The native integration provides greater efficiency, productivity and accuracy, which not only saves companies money but also helps them make money by closing deals faster,” he said.
Salesforce acquired Slack for $27.7 billion in late 2020 and started integrating its capabilities with the messaging app last year. Eventually, Stokes said, the company wants to bring every single aspect of Salesforce Customer 360 into Slack. It plans to introduce more integrations for each of its cloud products and industry solutions, with many becoming generally available later this year, he said without sharing further information.
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