#30 - Why we moved to Slack for our support community

This is the Doing It Online podcast with your host, serial entrepreneur, 6 and 7 figure funnel strategist and super nerd Kate McKibben. Where every week we're here talking nerdy and sharing the things that actually work to help you do what you do online, but better, easier, and with a ton more profit too. Are you ready? Let's do it.

Hey. Hey everybody, and welcome to episode 30 of the Doing It Online podcast. I'm Kate McEven, your host here from hellofunnels Co and today I want to take you behind the scenes on a really big decision. It might actually seem like a small one, but it was one that took us a while, which is why we have decided to take our customer service community. So that is what was previously a Facebook group with all of our clients and students in it, why we've taken it off of Facebook, sorry, Mark. And moved it onto Slack as well. And we're going to include in this episode today not just why we've done it, how we've done it, some of the tools that we're using to make it the best experience possible. And a few hints and tips as well, because it's not a straight like for like swap. So we're going to walk you through all of that. So first of all, I want to share the story around how I kind of came to this decision. Basically, I've been wanting to move away from Facebook groups for about two years and I have gone in and played with things like Slack and Mighty Networks multiple times over that period and they just weren't there yet. They weren't actually going to add anything from, you know, it really just seemed like all it was doing was moving for moving sake. I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to go through all the hassle of moving people over. And I don't just mean hassle for us and our team, I mean hassle for my clients. Because anytime you come in and disrupt and make a big change, you know, generally people don't like it, even if it's for the better. So I didn't want to do that until I'd found something that was actually going to be simple, that was actually going to have even more benefits and bring a lot more to the table. You know, other things I'd looked at were different sort of forums, plugins. You know, we use kajabi for our courses, so they've got sort of like a forum like theme that you can use. We played with all of that and really it wasn't until Late last year, when I signed up for a new coaching program myself, and I saw how that particular coach had their Slack channel laid out and how that was working and a few tools that they were using as well, that I went, right, it is finally ready. The, you know, slack has caught up, and it is now actually something which I think is far superior to the Facebook group can actually provide a better experience, is actually a better experience. Team from the team's point of view as well, it's going to make our lives easier. It's going to make it easier for us to be able to do our job, easier to provide better customer service. And, yeah, so it was kind of. Once I'd seen that in action and seen these sort of new updates that they'd done as well, with a few extra things that they've added in recently, I was like, yep, okay, it's time to go. And in case you're wondering why I wanted to move away from Facebook, there's a few different reasons. You know, I. I love Facebook. I use Facebook a lot for my business. I just found, for this specific purpose of Facebook groups, I found it wasn't. It was feeling really heavy, and it wasn't a great experience either for myself, for my team, or for my clients. So to start off with, you know, having to jump into Facebook a couple of times a day to check the support community is distracting, and it's a rabbit hole. And I found that what I was doing, and I can't speak for my team, but it's sort of hard not to, was, you know, you'd log in, you'd go through, answer the questions, things like that, interact with the group, and then a little notification would pop up. Like, I mean, this is the way that it's designed. It's designed to suck you in. And then all of a sudden, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever it was later, you know, I was down some rabbit hole looking at a third cousin's new baby photos. I'm like, how did I get here? And what just happened with that time? And, you know, I know that if I'm doing this, and I know other people are doing this, and I didn't want this for my clients either. Like, if they're in the middle of, you know, trying to get something set up, if they're in the middle of building out a complicated sequence or whatever, and they want to be able to just jump in, ask their question, or search to see if something has been posted before or get some support or just get, you know, some cheerleading or just know Connect or whatever it is that they're jumping in to do. You kind of don't want them to have to go into a place where there are those distractions and could potentially waste some of their time and take some of their energy. And I know that there's better things they could be doing with both. It's like putting a, you know, someone who's trying to quit sugar into a candy store or a chocolate shop. Like it's, you know, it's not. Yeah, it's just not beneficial to anyone to have all those distractions and temptations there, but things you could be doing and procrastinate on. So I wanted to, I didn't want to have our hub of our customer support sort of tied up and wrapped up in this big distracting rabbit hole. Also, I was finding that, you know, just the. Generally when posts were getting put up there, they'll being seen less by the clients anyway because obviously due to algorithm changes and things. So whereas previously it was a really great place to, you know, as well as obviously email and things like that was a really great place to post updates and information. Now so many times we were doing that and people weren't even seeing it. So again, you kind of go, well, you know, what's the point? And the other thing that I was finding was happening and it was super frustrating because, you know, I really, really pride myself on how much I freaking love helping my clients and how much I roll up my sleeves and get in there and I want to be in there answering and not leaving people hanging for, you know, days and weeks, as I have experienced myself and other programs. But sometimes, particularly when you have a group that can be quite busy at times, you know, posts, we just wouldn't see them. And it could be that someone had liked an old post so it got bumped up. Which meant that when we were scrolling down the feed, because it's all sort of in one place, we were scrolling down looking for new posts, looking for comments that hadn't been responded to. And then we'd get to a bunch of things that had all been responded to, but maybe they'd been liked or something and so that they'd been bumped up higher. But it meant that sometimes things were getting lost and there was just no one single place that we could go in and say, okay, here is all of the new posts and all of the new questions and we can answer them. Here is all of the responses to those that we want to read over and make sure that there's not something else that we need to respond to or give further information. So I found out like there's a lot of digging around. It just wasn't the. Yeah, it just wasn't the best use first time. And as I said, sometimes comments would get missed and that's not a great experience and people would get annoyed or upset or they feel that we'd let them down and I don't want that ever. So that was really big frustration for me. So these three things have been, you know, things I've been trying to find solutions for, for as I said, last two years of waiting for Facebook perhaps to come up with some new options, maybe some kind of inbox something, some way of tagging posts or you know, something like that. And it hasn't happened. So when I saw that Slack had made these recent updates, it was time to move. So like I said, over the last however long I've been looking at a few different platforms as options. So why did we choose Slack over the other ones and the other ones out there that are popular? As I said, there's mighty Networks which another one. I know a lot of people like just having some kind of inbuilt forum in your own website or in your own course platform, just allowing comments on your course platform as well as another option that you could do and setting that up in a kind of a almost forum like way. So there's lots of different things out there. And the reason we chose Slack is a few things. First of all, it's free. No one's got time for more. You should have seen my software bill last year. It was insane. I mean, mostly because we have to have access to all the software so we can do tutorials on it. So I mean, not many people out there have five different email software programs they're paying for. But still, I'm a little more hesitant these days to just grab another software unless it's, you know, it's really proving its value. Also, lots of the people in our community already use it because a large proportion of our community and clients are small business owners or business owners with small teams. A lot of them already use Slack and are familiar with it, which is great because it's less of a learning curve for people. I love that it has an app, which meant again, it was just easy for people to have it on their phone for them to still see notifications when people are responding to their comments and things. So again, it wasn't just because you want people to have that reminder to come back and check if they've gone in and they've asked a question or they've sort of started engaging in a conversation. I didn't want to lose that engagement that you get from something like Facebook where people are just logging in anyway. So I really. It was important that they had an app and some kind of notification system so people would still. Yeah, would still be kind of getting brought back in when they wanted to. And of course, you know, people can set their notifications to. They can turn them off, they can set them to be between certain periods as well, which I also thought was really great. It lets you create a more forum like experience than the Facebook feed does in that you can actually create different channels based around different topics or different programs so that it's just a bit more orderly. And I really liked that. And I also really liked it for when we have our like so inside our programs we do little live events. So we might have a four week fast start, which is like a four week live event in four clients where they can jump in for that time and you know, there's extra live calls, there's extra information, extra accountability, all of that stuff. And what you can actually now do is rather than creating a whole other Facebook group for it, all we do is create a new channel in our Slack channel, you know, for that event, invite the people in who want to be part of it and then only they see it and then we can archive it really easily when it's done as well. So again, it just, I got a bit more flexibility, a bit more categorization and I really, you know, the spreadsheet lover in me, the lover of order, really, really enjoyed that rather than just being one massive long feed that goes on forever. The other thing that just this was the icing on the cake for me. And this, I think this is a newer feature that they've added recently is that there is now a menu item on the sidebar in Slack which allows you to see the first one's all unreads. So it means you can jump in and see everything you haven't read yet, which is amazing. Rather than having to, you know, scroll down multiple feeds. And particularly with the model of Slack where you know you have different channels. I didn't want to have to be going in and clicking into all of these channels to find the new comments and the new things like that was just too much work and I knew again things would be getting lost. But now that there's a view where you can see them all in one place, you can mark them as red as you go through. That was yeah, that was fantastic. Also, you can see all the replies. So again, it just stops them getting lost. You can obviously see. You can also see if people have tagged you and things like, there's lots of different great options there. So it just made it again, really, really easy. And the other thing that I really liked, again, because we have a team who is answering questions, is that you can actually sort of. It's not an official feature, but we've sort of created a way to do it. But you can share posts with members of your team or other people in Slack. So when my team comes in and they check it in the morning and they go through and they answer the questions, they can answer, but they might be, hey, this is one for Kate. So they can share that post with me. And then I come in and I can just check the ones that have been shared with me. So we're still figuring out our exact processes around that. But it just means that, you know, if when it's someone's job to go through and make sure that everything has been sort of responded to and answered, there's now sort of just the tool just makes it easier for them to do that. And, you know, that, as I said, was kind of the thing that tipped me over and went, yes, this is gonna be a solution for us. So that's why we've chosen Slack, a few sort of tools and tips as well. I want to share with you guys that we've used that have helped us to, you know, make it better again, make it, you know, a really good experience. So there's two apps that we've got. They're both. They are both paid apps, but they're not expensive. I think they're like $7 each a month or something. So first one is Great bot, as in great, as in hello greeting. So that one does a couple of things. First thing it does is whenever someone joins is it has an automatic, like, hi, you know, so you can set up a channel which is like your welcome channel. And it. You can even set it to post a funny gif and, you know, say hello to them. Which I think is great because again, that was just something we were doing manually. So it can do it automatically. That also allows you. And I think you actually can just do that on the free plan if that's all you want it to do. But the thing that we really wanted to be able to do was have a couple of welcome messages that got sent to people to help, to onboard them into Slack, to help give them like a little walkthrough tell them what to expect, where they could find certain things and all that kind of stuff. So Greetbot lets you do that as well. So you can basically set up a series of messages. You want people to be sent, they'll be sent to them as direct messages. So again we only they see them and you can set them up, say whatever you want. So we've got sort of, you know, one with sort of our here's the rules about, you know, welcome, here's where you find things. We've got one that's got like our, our guidelines and the rules of our community. We've got one that sort of prompts them to make sure that they've added a photo and update their name and their bio so people know stuff about them like things like that. Just a nice onboarding process which you just can't do in a Facebook group. You kind of have to rely on having either, you know, a lot of things pinned at the top as notifications or trying to do those learning modules which are always just a bit clunky. So yeah, so that was really great. The second one which we got, which is also paid and sorry, I can't remember the price on top of my head, but it definitely wasn't expensive, was one called Slack Scheduler. So that's one thing I think Slack is missing just in its native features which again I was kind of waiting for. But then we found there was this option which was super cheap anyway, so it just allows you to schedule things in. So you know, if you are using it to, you know, run a challenge within your group and you want to pre schedule every, you know, the post for that challenge, you can do that. You can schedule into different channels. You can also set up recurring posts. So if you have a, like hey, every Friday you want to get people to share their wins or to do a check in or something like that, you can set that up too. So again, just making life easier, making things more efficient and easier for our team too. And the last one, it isn't an app, it's more just a little kind of hack that we figured out again that and this might be more specific to us and how we're using it because we have multiple different programs. And that again was one thing I was finding was tricky in the Facebook group because we had one group for everyone and people could be in different programs. People might ask a question and be like, okay, we don't know what program you're in. We have to ask that first to then be able to tell you where to go and find the answer that you've asked for. So now what we're using is one of the features in Slack is called custom statuses or statuses depending on where you are in the world. And that is, you would have seen it. It's, you know, it basically puts a little emoji next to your name and you can set them like people use them for all different things. But what we've done is we've set the default ones to be our course names and our program names and a little icon that kind of represents each. And then as part of our onboarding sequence, we ask people to go and set their custom status to be the program that we're in. And that way next to everyone's name, whenever they post a comment or ask a question, we can see right there, you know which program they're in straight away. So it makes it so super easy for us to be out of. Then go, oh great, this person is equals empire. They've got access to everything. So we'll tell them to go here or this person's in 5k funnel, so we'll send them over to this specific thing if, if you know, if it's relevant. So that again has just been really game changing for my team and I, customer service wise. And I also think it's kind of nice for the people in the programs to be able to see who else is in the program with them. So there's lots of different ways you could use that, that feature. It could be, you could use it for people as they're going through different phases, people who are in different industries or niches. Like lots of fun things you could do with that again just to help as part of your community building. So that's how we've got it all set up so far. And I'm sure like this is all new. We are literally moving people over as we speak. We did do a test run of this. I'm not just going completely into this blind and going to come back two weeks later and go, oh, it's the worst. We're moving back. So we ran one of our live 4 week fast starts in it last year and it was great. And so that's when we decided to make the move and bring everyone else over. The only downside that we have found so far is that when it comes to inviting people into Slack, you basically go, you create this invite link which you can then share and if people click it, they get, you know, added into your Slack channel. Problem is, although it's probably Not a bad thing. But the problem is that that invite link expires every 30 days. So that means that you have to be going and recreating an invite link every 30 days and then repasting it all the places where you currently are, like here, click here and join my Facebook group or you know, click here and join our community. And again, that just seemed like unnecessary extra work. So we came up with a little workaround for that, which is we're using. Because we already have Deadline Funnel, so we're using Deadline Funnel. We've basically created a link, a Deadline Funnel sort of countdown campaign that's set to change in like a hundred years or something. So it never will, basically. And then we're sharing, you know, we using that Deadline Funnel link in all the. So you know, when people get that welcome email on the welcome page when they go into the program and it says click here to join the community, we've got a Deadline Funnel link, all of those places in all of our programs. Because you can actually go into Deadline Funnel and just swap a link out and it doesn't change the URL, if that makes sense. So that means that we can just put this link in everywhere once and then every 30 days all we need to do is generate the new link, go into Deadline Funnel and swap it and we don't have to then change it anywhere else. It will change it everywhere. If you don't have Deadline Funnel, there are other ways of doing this. You can just use a, you know, good via a domain name in like your bluehost or whatever it is that you're using for your domain hosting and set it up as a redirect. Like there's lots of different ways you can do it, but that would probably my main time saving tip if you are going to go down this road. But yeah. So anyway, guys, I hope that has been useful for anyone who has been thinking that, you know, maybe the Facebook groups aren't, you know, thrilling you anymore and you've been coming up against some of those similar frustrations that I was having and you're looking for a better solution. We are. So far we are loving Slack. Of course there's always going to be some people who prefer one or the other and any change you make, as I said, it's. It's going to have some fans and it's going to have some people who, who really hate it. So we've been trying to ease everyone as much as possible, but so far feedback has been really positive from the team's point of view. We're really loving it. And yeah, I'll probably touch base again in a few months, let you know how it's been going. But I hope this has given you some good tips and some good places to start if you are looking to make the move. And if you are, feel free to let us know on Instagram. We have a new handle now. It's ellofunnels DM me. Let me know. And yeah, good luck with your with your community moving. So that's it for this week guys. Hope you all have an amazing rest of your week. I will see you same time next week for a brand new episode and until then keep doing what you do. Bye.

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