The company Slack has made public a new feature for its workplace chat service to let its customer use third-party services without leaving the app. Through their new Messages Buttons, companies can create interactive Slack applications that will perform in the chat window. Now, Slack customers will not have to leave the app to use other services.

For the initiative, Slack has 12 partners for the Messages Buttons, and it is allowing up to 5 buttons for every attachment. These 12 apps are the travel site Kayak, Greenhouse, which hires management service.

Slack customers will not have to browse for the 12 companies’ apps on the web, thanks to the messages button. Image Credit: QZ
Slack customers will not have to browse for the 12 companies’ apps on the web, thanks to the messages button. Image Credit: QZ

There’s also the incident management site, PagerDuty, and the business intelligence site, Qualtrics.  Kyber, a productivity tool is part of the accounting package Current. Abacus, the expense app along with Talkus helpdesk work in collaboration with the platform Trello. Talkdesk, a contact center solution is also included in the app list. The Al shopping assistant Kip, and Riffsy, and app for sharing GIF are also part of the new Slack feature.

This new change makes Slack a more versatile tool for the workplace and increases its users time on their chatroom.

What is innovating in the service technology field are “bots”, which are mini apps that can perform tasks within an application, This is what the messages buttons are in Slack. Other companies have use bots, among them is Facebook’s messenger, and Sappho, a standalone service.

Slack, the messaging app for teams, has over 3 million active users per day and more than 930 thousand users that pay for their service. The company is based on a free service concept where users can access to their essential features, and if they want to enjoy higher levels of storage and other options, they can pay for it.

The slack chatroom has an average use of 10 hours per weekday.

How to use the 12 new apps within Slack and its new integrations app store

Provided below, the full list of Slack's latest addition to its platform. The new feature are expected to fulfill users' demands and enhance their experience. Image Credit: TechCrunch
Provided below, the full list of Slack’s latest addition to its platform. The new feature is expected to fulfill users’ demands and enhance their experience. Image Credit: TechCrunch

Slack has made a list explaining how each app will work:

  • Kayak: search for flights and get instant flight updates through the Flight Tracker tool, find hotels, rental cars and set Price Alerts to see if prices change on the hotel or flight you want, all this within Slack.
  • Greenhouse: you can search, interview and hire the right talent from Slack. It is possible to set notifications directly to a user or to a particular Slack channel to recruit, including Approvals, New Candidates, New Referrals, Agency Submissions, and Scorecards Due.
  • PagerDuty: lets users review incoming alerts and mark them as known or resolved, from Slack.  
  • Qualtrics: it allows to create and send mini surveys within Slack for immediate feedback.
  • Kyber:  it is a conversational productivity tool for Slack, that offers project management, calendars, reminders and to-do lists. You can also send meeting invitations, assigned tasks, and manage all the reminders, events, and to-dos.

  • Current: allows sending money to employees via Slack
  • Abacus: it uses data and behavior analysis to make recommendations and automate expense creation and approvals. You can invite your team and pay reimbursements for approved expenses.
  • Talkus: it makes Slack the place for your team to communicate with customers by live chat or by email, phone or SMS.
  • Trello: create cards, invite team members, add deadlines and additional information from within Slack
  • Talkdesk: it creates links between companies’ internal and external communication processes by integrating TalkDesk’ contact center solution with Slack.
  • Kip helps assistants and managers save time collecting orders for office purchases within Slack.
  • Riffsy: the Slack integration allows to search and browse for the perfect GIF in over 33 languages.

Slack has recently launched an app store and intends to create new Messages Buttons with their partnership.

Source: HUE Wire