Team Communication. Slack.

In September of 2013, some of what is now the IndyKey team, attended a Victoria ‘Tech’ event at the Atrium building at Blanshard & Yates. The interest was in the speaker, Stuart Butterfield. He’s a local Victoria boy, who went on to co-found the image sharing site Flickr.

During his talk, he casually mentioned his next venture – Slack. It was explained as ‘helping make people less busy’. Sounds interesting we thought. What is it? A team communication platform based on the web and mobile devices.

Slack-2015-03-17-21-29-31

Fast forward 18 months. Slack has exploded. Remarkably. Watch the 18 second video. The service is adding $1 million in paid subscribers every 11 days.

Why should you care? Slack is a great tool for Hotels & Resorts. Here’s what it can do:

  1. Share communication ‘channels’ with various people & teams. Think ‘useful collaboration’.
  2. Private message your team, individuals and the content stays in Slack.
  3. The basic version is fully functional, and is FREE.  Yes free.
  4. With a paid account, you can share channels with vendors, or customers.
  5. It integrates with bunch of 3rd party services, via its API integrations. Easy for non-techies to do.
  6. Want custom integrations via Slack’s API? You can build them, or use one someone may have built already.
  7. iOS, Android, & Desktop versions. Super easy to check in, and stay connected to your team.
  8. It consolidates Twitter feeds, Help Desk applications and many others you likely use today.
  9. Document sharing is easy, with groups through integrations with Google Docs, Pages, Dropbox or plain old XLS and .DOC attachments.
  10. Create private channels for executives or a board of directors, with more sensitive information like finance or legal topics.

Real life examples: Housekeeping has a channel relevant for all things to housekeeping. Guest services has its own channel. But they can view each other’s feeds and even comment. Driving cross department engagement, without email bombardment.

If ‘John’ in maintenance speaks with a guest who has an issue that needs resolving, he can just type it the guest services channel and they are alerted, and its recorded.

The GM has access to all channels, can see twitter feeds, guest complaints, maintenance issues or monitor the status of such items. GM posts to the #general channel for announcements to all staff. Slack’s uses are limited only by your imagination.

The real power of slack is that it becomes a searchable repository for knowledge. Have you ever had a key employee quit and wonder where ‘everything’ is? How about training a new employee? Where to start…? With Slack, helps them get up to speed through assigning the appropriate channels to their profile. Then, they are able to communicate with the team and review the work history on their own.

Lastly, Stuart is a funny guy. This Wired magazine article has his infamous ‘resignation letter’ when he resigned from Yahoo. It’s about half way down the lengthy, but interesting article.

Get Slack and be less busy.

This form does not exist