Your guide to building customer loyalty in the age of remote work

We recently surveyed our customers and found that more than 50% say they would switch to a competitor after just one bad experience. If they had a second bad experience, that number snowballs to 80%.

Business leaders who understand that success rests on superior customer experience are always seeking better ways to unite their teams in order to best serve the customer. That means weaving support and service teams throughout the entire organization rather than pushing customer care into its own silo.

That's why Oscar and Riot Games are turning to Slack channels, a single place to share files and messages, to power this customer-centric transformation. Here's how these teams are using channels to empower their customer experience and support teams to build and maintain customer loyalty.

Oscar: Coordinating white-glove customer care in Slack

Oscar is a direct-to-consumer health insurance company built around a proprietary full stack technology platform and suite of member engagement services. Since its founding in 2012, the company has expanded to serve approximately 529,000 members across 291 counties in 18 states. Oscar members are not only satisfied with the platform, they're also satisfied with the service: Oscar's average member-reported Net Promoter Score is 30, compared with an industry average of 3 among other health insurers, according to Forrester. Sebastian Burzacchi, vice president of service operations at Oscar, explained that the secret to customer satisfaction is customized support. Every Oscar member has their own personalized Care Team, which consists of dedicated Care Guides and a team of clinical experts like a licensed nurse. Care Teams are regionalized and Care Guides are experts in the member's hospital network and geography.

When an Oscar member has an issue, their Oscar Care Team is there to support that person end-to-end. Behind the scenes, the Care Teams use tiered Slack channels to share knowledge and find answers fast. These include:

• Care team channels (tier one), where Care Guides source fast responses to common problems and questions.
• State and regional channels (tier two), for questions pertaining to state-specific rules and guidelines.
• Expert channels (tier three), for complex or uncommon issues; these are segmented by topic, such as claims, providers and eligibility.
• #ohh-timesroom (Care Guide communications channel), used to communicate high-level government updates, policy changes and member-friendly messaging to all Care Team members. Every care team has a custom emoji, which is used as a "read receipt" on important announcements.

The tiered channels ensure that service representatives can quickly tap the right people for help.

"In Slack, we can troubleshoot and identify the information needed to answer a question, and this enables us to be more succinct and efficient when responding to members," Burzacchi says.

"Slack allows us to solve issues in almost real time, often with the member on the phone."

Riot Games: Expediting incident response in Slack

Riot Games is famous for its player-focused PC games, including League of Legends, the most-played PC game in the world. As League enters its second decade, Riot Games is continuing to develop and deliver new experiences for players. And behind the scenes, Slack is helping IT teams stay on top of their incidence response game.

Byron Dover, engineering manager and head of IT applications at Riot Games, explained how the company adopted Slack wall-to-wall in 2015 and became one of Slack's very first Enterprise Grid customers in 2017. Enterprise Grid is Slack's solution for large or complex organizations that includes Slack's most robust tools to maintain security and compliance.

Dover shared how Riot Games engineers rely on custom apps to provide insight and visibility into game builds and deploys in real time. When a build starts, a new message is posted to a shared Slack channel. The message is updated throughout the build's different stages.

If the build fails, the app automatically posts a notification to Slack with a detailed account of what went wrong. Slack apps even mention the developer responsible for the latest code change so that teams can begin immediate triage. "Slack provides a single pane of glass into the build and deployment lifecycle for our software developers," Dover said.

Slack also helps engineers stay on top of operations and on-call support. The game teams use the Sentry integration for Slack to monitor crash analytics and diagnostics. Sentry captures data whenever a player experiences a game crash and automatically posts a summary of events to actively monitored Slack channels. On-call engineers can assign crashes to colleagues directly via Slack and resolve incidents from Slack as well.

Engineers also troubleshoot incidents with the PagerDuty integration for Slack. PagerDuty sends alerts to dedicated notification channels in Slack. From there, teams can escalate as needed to a universal, shared channel across all of RiotGames workspaces, which is actively monitored by a global network operations center.

"Slack's real-time communication platform allows Riot to mirror our organization in digital channels and workspaces," Dover said. This kind of streamlined communication is how teams develop games and resolve incidents fast, the key to keeping Riot Games' fanbase happy and growing.

If you'd like to learn more about how you and your team can get started with Slack, schedule a free 20-minute consultation with one of our experts.