Guiding Conversation Design
I was hired to guide the conversation design direction during the Slack acquisition to ensure a smooth integration and thoughtful conversational experiences.
As a Conversation Designer at Salesforce, I helped build bots and enhance the company's conversational AI maturity, including creating guidelines, conducting workshops, and teaching best practices.
Context switching ruins marketer's productivity
Cara is a talented marketing campaign manager who uses Slack and Salesforce Marketing Cloud to manage her campaigns. However, she has to switch between the two platforms to stay updated on campaign performance, make updates, and answer inquiries by her team.
Cara's current workflow for managing marketing campaigns is fragmented and time-consuming.
Focusing on Customer Insights
Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers over thousands features acquired from various apps. I had to strategically select the most relevant user goals that would support Cara in her day-to-day activities.
Context Switching
Time Saving
Integration native to Slack UI / Socializing Data
Reducing marketing context switching
Marketing managers like Cara need a solution to manage their campaigns without having to switch between different tools and platforms. I explored 3 approaches - slack app, slash command and slack bot. Slash commands and Slack apps are not ideal solutions, as they can be time-consuming to build and difficult for general marketers. A conversational approach is more efficient as it allows users to interact with the system using natural language.
Discovering the main intents
After researching the design feature backlog for Marketing Cloud products and Salesforce current market research, I realized that while creating campaigns was useful, marketers wanted a quick way to track and target the right customers, which they saw as the key to successful marketing. This research was not limited to past user interviews, interviews with Marketing Cloud product team members, up to date personas and user journey maps.
Campaign Insights: View campaign insights directly in Slack.
Campaign Comparison: Compare campaign results side-by-side in Slack.
Lookalike Campaign Creation: Set up lookalike campaigns directly in Slack.
Campaign Performance Sharing: Easily share campaign performance data with others directly in Slack.
Integrating these features in Slack would make it easier and more efficient for Cara and her team to understand the statuses of campaigns and complete tasks.
Designing the main chatbot flows
I designed chat flows for Cara to get the right information at the right time, and accomplish tasks all within Slack, accessing Marketing Cloud data conversationally.
I used progressive disclosure to gradually reveal relevant information and options based on her needs and context. This was aligned with Marketing Cloud guidelines and Slack's interface and interaction patterns.
Balancing Voice & Tone
I carefully considered the voice and tone of both Salesforce and Slack when designing the bot's responses. The bot’s dialogue reflects Salesforce's Lightning Design writing guidelines, incorporating Slack's casual flair, resulting in a balanced tone that is both professional and engaging.
Training the Bot – Low-Code Development
Our stacks significantly reduced the design burden on developers, making scalability easy and the overall development process more efficient and flexible. This allowed us to easily make updates without extensive coding, freeing up developer time.
The bot builder couldn’t send files
During this project, I faced the challenge of addressing the bot builder's limitation to send files. Instead, I displayed information using rich text formatting to present campaign data. Presenting campaign data using Slack's rich text formatting was an effective workaround, as it required no additional code, was easily shareable within Slack, and could use emojis to improve readability.
Enthusiasm for Integration
Internal testing with 4 Marketing Cloud product team members, and 4 Sales associates, along with dialog feedback from 5 conversation designers, validated that the Slack guided experience enables Cara to use quick responses for efficient retrieval of Marketing Cloud information. Traditionally, creating a look-alike campaign can take 5-10 minutes, but advanced users with intent recognition can do it in seconds.
A Conversational & Proactive Assistant
My objective was to streamline data communication and reduce context switching for marketing managers by integrating Marketing Cloud into Slack conversationally.
Signals from leadership were promising, with several marketing cloud product team colleagues (20+) expressing excitement about the time savings and expanding intents to increase manager productivity and data insights offered by the integration.
We anticipated that this enthusiasm would translate into adoption, ultimately reducing the need for marketing managers to navigate Salesforce Marketing Cloud for routine activities.
True to my northstar
My north star throughout this journey was pretty clear. I was shooting for a way to make Marketing Cloud integration in Slack as conversational and proactive as possible, where the tech we use feels more like a helpful companion than a tool. By laying down foundational intents and deeply understanding our technology constraints and the aspirations of Marketing Cloud customers, we've set the stage for future innovations at scale.
