Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Unthread (YC S22) – Customer support, entirely within Slack

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 58 posts

Re: Launch HN: Unthread (YC S22) – Customer support, entirely within Slack

#21

Post by bachonk »

eliannag wrote: post #13
artembugara wrote: post #11

Great product. Once we have more clients, I would totally love to use your product. We find Slack is the best to work with other teams.

same thought over here - love the product only problem I have is that there is no way for me to 'grow in to' unthread unless I'm a larger company from the start. Would love a freemium tier for the little guys, but also get why at this stage you might not have it :)

That makes a ton of sense. We currently have a freemium with 1 free channel, but could be good to increase that limit so you can get it into your workflow early on

Re: Launch HN: Unthread (YC S22) – Customer support, entirely within Slack

#22

Post by jeremy_k »

Any thoughts on building a widget for on-site issues? I could see our company adopting this right away as we're heavy users of Slack connect to interface with our customers. We migrated from Intercom to FreshDesk and our current workflow in Slack is very reactive where a customer brings up an issue and a ticket is created later. However we do still get some tickets created from the on-site widget and it might be a non-starter to migrate without that functionality.

Re: Launch HN: Unthread (YC S22) – Customer support, entirely within Slack

#23

Post by bachonk »

jeremy_k wrote: post #22

Any thoughts on building a widget for on-site issues? I could see our company adopting this right away as we're heavy users of Slack connect to interface with our customers. We migrated from Intercom to FreshDesk and our current workflow in Slack is very reactive where a customer brings up an issue and a ticket is created later. However we do still get some tickets created from the on-site widget and it might be a no…

This is our #1 priority right now and are actively building it. We still have an Intercom widget on our dashboard just in case, and can't wait to replace it. If you sign up, I can let you know when this is closer to being live (and you can share some feedback on an early prototype)

Re: Launch HN: Unthread (YC S22) – Customer support, entirely within Slack

#24

Post by jeremy_k »

bachonk wrote: post #23
jeremy_k wrote: post #22

Any thoughts on building a widget for on-site issues? I could see our company adopting this right away as we're heavy users of Slack connect to interface with our customers. We migrated from Intercom to FreshDesk and our current workflow in Slack is very reactive where a customer brings up an issue and a ticket is created later. However we do still get some tickets created from the on-site widget and it might be a no…

This is our #1 priority right now and are actively building it. We still have an Intercom widget on our dashboard just in case, and can't wait to replace it. If you sign up, I can let you know when this is closer to being live (and you can share some feedback on an early prototype)

Thanks for the update! I passed the information along to the our Customer Support team.

Re: Launch HN: Unthread (YC S22) – Customer support, entirely within Slack

#26

Post by treis »

I think end customer support is the wrong audience for this. Few of them are going to have a pre-existing Slack relationship with your company and you don't really want to make them jump through hoops to get support. Think the better target is internal teams supporting other internal teams. The "Hi [team X], I'm trying to foo the bar..." stuff you get in your public team channel.

Re: Launch HN: Unthread (YC S22) – Customer support, entirely within Slack

#27

Post by bachonk »

mxstbr wrote: post #25

How does Unthread compare to Abbot? ( https://ab.bot )

Abbot's pretty great, but uses a chatbot with customers. We stay behind the scenes and empower the reps to respond themselves. We also support email Slack which they do not

Re: Launch HN: Unthread (YC S22) – Customer support, entirely within Slack

#28

Post by treis »

treis wrote: post #26

I think end customer support is the wrong audience for this. Few of them are going to have a pre-existing Slack relationship with your company and you don't really want to make them jump through hoops to get support. Think the better target is internal teams supporting other internal teams. The "Hi [team X], I'm trying to foo the bar..." stuff you get in your public team channel.

Also, the problem I think we all have with Slack is picking the important messages out of the deluge. I've been mulling a sort of SLA/prioritization tool for Slack messages. Something where you could set SLAs like "If my skip level manager DMs me I want to respond in 5 minutes" and do the Pagertree sort of escalation until I respond.

You can apply this to channels and do more intelligent notifications than Slack does. Like if a Director or higher posts in your team's public channel then kick off the Pagertree notification. Or if a post has gotten 10+ replies in 5 minutes.

Can't tell you how many times I've been late on important messages because Slack's notifications are coarse and terrible.

Re: Launch HN: Unthread (YC S22) – Customer support, entirely within Slack

#29

Post by orliesaurus »

I think this is a good idea for very small teams but for someone who has used and set up:

- Shared Gmail accounts

- Front App

- Zendesk

- Streak for Gmail

to handle customer support/customer success, I can tell you that Slack is probably not a tool that will allow you to scale!

Here's why.

When you do customer success, you usually have to have multiple people in the team handling a customer ticket.

You need to be able to quickly reference other tickets and run automation to be effective.

I use Slack daily and have used it since the early days: Searching for things on Slack sucks plainly. Threading is either you love it or you hate it. You want to flag a message to another person -so they can see it later, perhaps because they're in a different timezone GOOD LUCK.

A parallel could be this: imagine not having A/C and living in hot country like Texas... yeah not fun if you're trying to be productive now is it. (source: me, I tried. NOT FUN)

Re: Launch HN: Unthread (YC S22) – Customer support, entirely within Slack

#30

Post by bachonk »

treis wrote: post #28
treis wrote: post #26

I think end customer support is the wrong audience for this. Few of them are going to have a pre-existing Slack relationship with your company and you don't really want to make them jump through hoops to get support. Think the better target is internal teams supporting other internal teams. The "Hi [team X], I'm trying to foo the bar..." stuff you get in your public team channel.

Also, the problem I think we all have with Slack is picking the important messages out of the deluge. I've been mulling a sort of SLA/prioritization tool for Slack messages. Something where you could set SLAs like "If my skip level manager DMs me I want to respond in 5 minutes" and do the Pagertree sort of escalation until I respond. You can apply this to channels and do more intelligent notifications than Slack does…

Yeah that totally makes sense. I used to work at a big tech co where we had a Slack channel for internal users of our product, and it was hard to keep up.

Kind of an interesting idea to use different SLAs depending on the role of the user who posts. Or maybe exclude people who you know won't add anything to the conversation.

Post reply on HN