“The overhead of working among different offices becomes less of an issue” with Slack, said Nick Coronges, chief technology officer at R/GA, a 1,000-person design and marketing agency with offices in several cities.
Collaboration software like Slack is not new. Google’s Wave, which started in 2009 and shut down in 2012, was supposed to replace email with a messaging tool, but conversations were too hard to follow and track. Atlassian, an Australian software company, released a team collaboration platform in 2004 and acquired Slack’s nearest start-up rival, HipChat, in 2012.
But Slack has focused on making a product that people love, a strategy that is more common among consumer companies like Apple, Snap and Spotify.
Slack modeled itself after consumer messaging apps that let users communicate with GIFs, stickers and emojis. One Slack emoji is a cartoon raccoon with its palms pressed in respectful greeting. Called “raccooning,” it signifies, “Please take this conversation someplace else. You are getting off topic.”
In Slack’s office in Vancouver, British Columbia, designers think about things like color choice, layout and Slack’s sign-in greeting, and how they might affect a customer’s peace of mind. Back at San Francisco headquarters, data jockeys pore over the kinds of signals that tech companies normally study, like time spent with the product and whether moving a button elicits a change in behavior.
“Building a product that allows for significant improvements in how people communicate requires a degree of thoughtfulness and craftsmanship that is not common in the development of enterprise software,” Slack wrote in an open letter to Microsoft that ran as a full-page ad in November in The New York Times.
Unlike some Silicon Valley companies, Slack believes humans are as important as robots. All executives, including Mr. Butterfield, have fielded the 6,000 customer support calls and 2,800 Twitter messages that come in each week. The average turnaround time for a help request is under an hour.
“I get worried if I see customer satisfaction scores dip below 97 percent,” said Ali Rayl, Slack’s head of customer experience.
If Slack can dovetail seamlessly with how people behave, feel like second nature to use and strongly appeal to employees, taking it away could become “like taking off your astronaut helmet in space,” Mr. Butterfield said.
