Slack tips we use at Smallchat

Get the most out of your Slack + Smallchat Experience

At Smallchat we’re pretty big fans of Slack (shocker I know) and the wonderful amount of functionality it has built in. We use it for internal communication, keeping up with a community of friends and like-minded creators, and of course, Smallchat. So we thought we’d share a few tips and tricks we’ve found incredibly helpful, particularly when handling heavy amounts of Smallchat traffic.

🔮 All Threads View

Whenever we have a bunch of conversations going on around the same time, the All Threads view (cmd + shift + T) will become your best friend. You can easily bounce back and forth between different threads and see every conversation as it’s happening from one central spot.

📌 Pin Answers to Your Most Common Questions

This was something we started doing right after launch week. It has since become a huge time saver for us. If you find yourself often answering the same few questions over and over, simply pin a great response in your channel. This way it’s always there when you need it. No more hunting down a specific snippet of code or that link to your discount code.

If you need some more info on this check out Slack’s how to.

🗃️ Organize Your Conversations

Often times you’ll find that certain pages of your site (i.e. a pricing page or pages behind a user login) will generate different types of conversations. We recommend breaking those out into separate channels for better organization. At Smallchat we handle this by having conversations from our marketing site, small.chat, go to one channel #chat-smallchat , and then we have another channel, #chat-smallchat-support which handles conversations coming from the Smallchat Dashboard. This is incredibly helpful because we know messages in the support channel are from users, not just visitors, and as such their chats tend to be more troubleshooting or support related rather than the general inquiries we receive from small.chat.

✅ Add Reactions

This is quick and fun Slack tool we’ve started using to allow us to quickly see the status of conversations. We add reactions after conversations as a simple means of resolution so you can quickly skim a channel and see chats that led to a sale 💰 or a conversation mentioning a 🐛 report, etc.

✏️ Message Formating & Messsage Editing

When we were building Smallchat, we wanted everyone to take advantage of the convenient and fast message formatting that Slack offers. So go ahead and *bold that key step* or send a snippet of `code as a code block`. Your customers will see it exactly how you intended.

Side note: For those of you ever on the visitor end of a Smallchat conversation, you too can use all the formatting shortcuts you’d use inside Slack. 🙂

**Also, for those of us who can’t spell to save their lives, you can edit
messages quickly even after they’ve been sent. Slack has a great shortcut for this — simply press the up arrow while in a thread to quickly edit the last message you sent.

🔔 Notifications

This one is huge. Smallchat relies on Slack notifications to notify you whenever you have an incoming message. You’ll definitely want to have notifications turned on, but that said, no one wants a computer that’s just knocking at them all day. So on our team, we did a bit of custom configuring to get our Notifications just right (Slack is great at this btw).

Hopefully these few tips will make your Smallchat experience (or simply your daily Slacking) even better. I’m sure there’s some great tips and shortcuts we’ve left out, and if there’s anything you find helpful be sure to share it in the comments or just chat with us at small.chat! ✌️