Introduction
Slack is a space that empowers teams to communicate in a convenient way. The popularity of this app is undeniable within teams that are progressive.
The real value that Slack sells is team productivity and communication solution. Speaking about productivity, Slack exposes its APIs for creating custom functionalities for Slack that can be integrated into your Slack experience like they were native to Slack. This is where the productivity bit gets exponential growth.
How does it work? Basically, these Slack's public APIs can be used for creating so called Slack Apps. By installing a Slack App created by any Slack partner, you get additional features for Slack. To be clear, that features are served by the Slack App owner's infrastructure and not by Slack. This means that almost under each Slack App or Slack partner you should expect a SaaS business. There is a big chance that for using their service, you would need to pay.
This blog post will give you an idea of what Slack apps you could leverage for increasing your team productivity, visibility of business resources, and communication. Let's get right into it by examining some of the most popular Slack apps.
Google Drive
Teams that use GSuite as a platform for their business, should be very happy with this App. Tracking the activity of resources in Google Drive from Slack is a great improvement for boosting response timing within a team.
Some other actions that you can perform directly from Slack:
- Creating new Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets files
- Sharing files from Slack
- Files lookup
- Reply to comments on files from Slack
Giphy
Making your teamwork on Slack entertaining and fun contributes to your team culture in a positive way. GIFs that have something fun can definitely help.
By installing this app, your teammates get a Slack command "/gipfy" which can be used in any channel or conversation in order to post a GIF that matches your keyword. For instance, typing "/giphy cats" will display a cat GIF in your channel.
Zoom
Are you using Zoom for meetings? Install the Zoom Slack app and ease your team's efforts for scheduling Zoom calls, joining them, recording and etc.
Zoom is a powerful video/audio calls platform that is very popular outside Slack workspaces.
Trello
Trello helps teams to visualize and track the progress of processes that are happening within their organization.
Not surprisingly, integration with Slack helps teams to work with Trello straight from Slack. Track activity on tasks that are in Trello, create tasks and use many more other kinds of interactivity.
Google Calendar
Managing your daily schedule on Google Calendar is an inevitable attribute while working within a team. Why not do it faster and from Slack?
The integration of Google Calendar and Slack opens doors for Slack status change depending on your schedule of meetings. Let your team know when you're busy according to the Google Calendar schedule.
More features that boost your productivity:
- Creating events directly from Slack
- Tracking status of events
- Notifications about events and joining directly from Slack
- Seeing the schedule from Slack
- Replying to invites from Slack
Twitter is a communication platform that is well known and very popular among a wide range of users. Most of the companies who use Slack have a Twitter account that represents their business.
The Twitter Slack App adds pretty tweets displaying on Slack when someone posts a link to a tweet. It includes all the media attached to tweets.
Moreover, you can use Slack for tweeting.
Simple Poll
Communication has the element of diversity and this is why sometimes decisions need to be made according to the majority's choice. This Slack app helps to record team opinions from a pre-defined options list and come up with the results set that in most cases drives further decision making.
A Poll can be started by a simple Slack command, you can also use various features, for instance, decide if it should be anonymous or recurring.
The app offers not just Polls but Surveys as well that are conducted by the bot in private with each team member.
Standup.ly Bot
Standuply is a gem for teams working according to the Agile project management framework. It's a great app for progressive Slack teams that want to keep track of people and the work they are doing in writing.
Asynchronous standups & retro meetings, Planning poker, sprint planning & backlog grooming, 360 degree feedback & OKRs, Agile charts calculation and much more.
This app will work with a basic setup for small teams and also for bigger players that want to keep records and structure of their team management.
Zapier
Zapier is the top platform for integrations among thousands of apps. Any app in their directory can expose data to other Zapier apps which makes integrations among the apps easy and smooth. The Slack App that Zapier offers, lets to consume data from other tools (not other Slack apps) and display it in your Slack Workspace.
It can be data from Gmail, HubSpot, Typeform, and more. A really powerful app keeping in mind all the thousands of other apps connected to Zapier.
SignalZen
Customer Support via Live Chat on your website is something that many visitors expect. Lucky you, there is a Slack app for making it work directly from Slack.
You can integrate your Live Chat solution that SignalZen offers with Slack and in this way reach better productivity for your team when it comes to Customer Support. Let your teammates participate in your Customer Support strategy.
Each operator is created automatically so just after a few integration steps on the Console, you can instantly start working with your prospects from your website.
You can find more details on how to set it up here.
Final word
The supply of Slack apps in the Slack App Directory is overwhelming. There you can find apps that you even haven't imagined and that could make your team's work more productive and easier.
Most likely, if you have anything in your mind that could improve your team's productivity, Slack App Directory already offers such an app.
Here at SignalZen, we also offer exceptionally advanced Slack integration for Live Chat that is approved by the Slack team. We're part of this community and keeping in sync the feature set according to the newest technological solutions that Slack exposes.
If you wish to try Live Chat integration with your Slack Workspace, drop us a line at info@signalzen.com or use Live Chat as usual!
