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

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

#51

Post by pydry »

paxys wrote: post #36
commitpizza wrote: post #6

Seems nice but I would be afraid of basing my business on another product. If successful, there is nothing to say that Slack wouldn't simply copy the functionality and launching their own feature. Happens all the time with these popular services within other popular services.

That's not as much of a risk as people make it out to be. Being successful is a good thing, even if you are dependent on another platform. As long as you are adding something of value, you are more likely to get bought out by Slack than get ripped off by them.

Even if they do the negotiations will be one sided coz they can always cut you off and replace you with an internally made product that's 80% as good with no integration costs.

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

#52

Post by RBouschery »

This looks awesome and your demo has already created quite the stir in our company Slack chat this morning. Just yesterday we were discussing how we can finally close the gap between Slack messages and a ticketing system.

One question - how does it deal with people sending 5 separate messages on the same "issue" - we unfortunately have a bunch of clients that seem to be allergic to Slack's thread feature...

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

#54

Post by amrrs »

krashidov wrote: post #46

congrats on launching! I co founded a similar startup (halp.com) but for internal support. Of course we get some external support customers here and there as well. Would love to chat and share any learnings

Honestly I came here to see if anyone mentions Halp. Wonderful Slack Product. It's a shame Slack doesn't capitalise much on creating such a market place.

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

#55

Post by bachonk »

RBouschery wrote: post #52

This looks awesome and your demo has already created quite the stir in our company Slack chat this morning. Just yesterday we were discussing how we can finally close the gap between Slack messages and a ticketing system. One question - how does it deal with people sending 5 separate messages on the same "issue" - we unfortunately have a bunch of clients that seem to be allergic to Slack's thread feature...

It's a tough problem but the system is smart enough to group messages that come in through the top level. We use a time-based system where messages that come in within a certain period of time get grouped into the same ticket

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

#56

Post by mrmanner »

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.

We have customers at work who would happily pay a large sum of money to move support from ticket system/email/whatever to a shared Slack channel :)

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

#57

Post by icey »

bachonk wrote: post #27
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

Abbot CEO here! Appreciate the kind words, we hope you enjoyed your trial before starting Unthread :)

It's true that we use a bot user in channels - we do this to help synchronize conversations that happen in Slack with other systems. We figure that conversations happen in Slack but often get shared elsewhere. Abbot only responds if customers set it up to do that.

Good luck with your launch!

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