[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Unthread (YC S22) - Customer support, ent...
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Launch HN: Unthread (YC S22) - Customer support, entirely within
Slack
Howdy HN! Tom and Jake here from Unthread (https://unthread.io). We
make it easy for businesses to manage customer experience (CX) end-
to-end inside of Slack. We automatically create tickets for new
conversations, handle assignments & escalations, triage with other
teams, etc -- all without leaving Slack. Here's a quick Loom
showing how it works:
https://www.loom.com/share/8158371d29c84550863adbd6719bb112
Unthread was born out of a failed B2B SaaS startup that we were
running for about 2 years. We found clients preferred sending bug
reports and feature requests through Slack instead of email or the
Intercom widget embedded in our app. This was great for us - Slack
is a tool we were already using every day, it's quick and easy to
respond, and it's less formal than composing an email. The problem
is that chat != ticketing, and we struggled to keep track of what
needed responses or follow-ups. We used a combination of "mark
unread", "remind me", and DMs to try to triage, and things still
slipped through the cracks. We started building Unthread to manage
our own customers' requests inside of Slack. After piloting with
other companies in our YC batch who were having the same pain
point, we decided to pivot to it being our product. Unthread
automatically tracks incoming messages to a channel. We use some
basic NLP to determine if it's an issue or a friendly hello. If
it's an issue, we create a ticket, assign an owner, and send a
private message to the assignee that they need to respond. We have
an "inbox" in Slack where you can see all of the open conversations
that are assigned to you, manage the status of each conversation,
and close them out when you're done. If you're also doing email
support, you can forward emails into a Slack channel where reps can
compose a response to be sent via email. The unique approach
Unthread takes is that none of this is visible to the end customer.
We use a combination of ephemeral messages (only visible to your
team) and DMs to keep things private. Customers don't want to talk
to a chatbot, so we help support reps provide real responses to
customers by giving them the tools behind the scenes to organize
and collaborate. We also have an escalation system (think
PagerDuty for Slack messages) to notify a backup person if there
hasn't been a response in time. You can configure this on a per-
customer basis to set shorter SLAs for more valuable accounts, and
we're working on adding rotations of who's the primary point of
contact. Anyone in the HN community can install the Slack app
directly by using this special link: unthread.io/?referral=hn.
We're excited to hear how this resonates with folks' current
experience using Slack for CX! I imagine there are some opinionated
workflows out there :)
Author : bachonk
Score : 58 points
Date : 2022-11-14 13:13 UTC (9 hours ago)
| jeremy_k wrote:
| Any thoughts on building a widget for on-site issues? I could see
| our company adopting this right away as we're heavy users of
| Slack connect to interface with our customers. We migrated from
| Intercom to FreshDesk and our current workflow in Slack is very
| reactive where a customer brings up an issue and a ticket is
| created later. However we do still get some tickets created from
| the on-site widget and it might be a non-starter to migrate
| without that functionality.
| bachonk wrote:
| This is our #1 priority right now and are actively building it.
| We still have an Intercom widget on our dashboard just in case,
| and can't wait to replace it. If you sign up, I can let you
| know when this is closer to being live (and you can share some
| feedback on an early prototype)
| treis wrote:
| This is what I meant by my other post. It's been a minute
| since I've been in the CX space but when I was there all the
| cool kids were talking about seamless multi-channel support.
| The idea being that a customer could start a ticket by
| Tweeting, calling, web chat, app, e-mail, website form, or
| whatever. The CX rep has a unified view of all this
| communication and can respond on the customer's platform of
| choice.
|
| So your image of Unthread => Other apps is the reverse of
| where the industry is going. You need the other direction
| where any number of channels get funneled into Unthread.
| jeremy_k wrote:
| Thanks for the update! I passed the information along to the
| our Customer Support team.
| rudi_mk wrote:
| Lovely idea! We use Slack for CX - per-customer channels. I think
| one of our concerns with this approach is the fact that it
| doesn't feel scalable, especially when it comes to locating
| knowledge/experience around similar support queries/cases. I was
| wondering about your thoughts on that front?
| bachonk wrote:
| Our goal is to make it scalable! With the Slack Inbox and the
| auto-assignments, you could literally mute all of your customer
| channels and still stay on top of everything. Our largest
| customer right now has >700 Slack Connect channels
| rudi_mk wrote:
| Now I'm psyched to try this out.
| hrpnk wrote:
| The page with stats looks neat!
|
| This system could work for any chatops style of work (Slack,
| Teams, GChat), incl. within the company where team A supports
| teams B-Z. The plethora of unmanaged threads is like a parasite
| and team A does not realize how much support work they really do
| as chat threads are just threads with 0 stats. Being able to mark
| ongoing/finished/stalled threads and create tickets/new issues
| out of these is highly valuable for managers of chat-support
| teams.
| bcjordan wrote:
| Love the idea of managing support tickets via Slack threads!
|
| - Is there a workflow to use this for a support@ email inbox? (&
| which pricing tier is that a part of?)
|
| - Is there support for customizing an auto-response to those
| emails?
| bachonk wrote:
| Woot!
|
| - Yes there is. This is available for any tier
|
| - We currently have auto-responses for Slack messages. Auto-
| responses for emails is on the way!
| nzoschke wrote:
| Looks neat!
|
| So many of our support cases end up with a Slack thread to
| discuss, triage, get subject matter experts to chime in.
|
| Syncing this discussion back up with the case and the customer is
| a real chore.
|
| How do you integrate with ticket systems? We still need a
| Salesforce Case as the source of truth for a customer
| interaction.
|
| With Salesforce owning Slack, you'd think they'd have some deeper
| integrations by now but alas they still feel totally separate.
| bachonk wrote:
| We have a Zapier integration that handles syncing with external
| systems. But yeah we want to keep the conversation in Slack
| rather than splintering it to some external ticketing platform
| smashah wrote:
| Few years back for an accelerator I implemented something similar
| (Whatsapp as customer frontend, dialogflow for CX flow, Slack for
| conversation archive, back-office and HITL). Looking back I
| should've used discord instead. Are you planning on integrating
| with slack for smaller companies?
| smikatoots wrote:
| we already do this with our design partners and b2b customers.
| it's manageable at a small size but tedious at a grander scale.
| great insight to build on!
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
| mxstbr wrote:
| How does Unthread compare to Abbot? (https://ab.bot)
| bachonk wrote:
| Abbot's pretty great, but uses a chatbot with customers. We
| stay behind the scenes and empower the reps to respond
| themselves. We also support email <> Slack which they do not
| TBloom wrote:
| Looks neat! Bringing work in to the tools people naturally
| collaborate in seems like a huge win.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| I think this is a good idea for very small teams but for someone
| who has used and set up:
|
| - Shared Gmail accounts
|
| - Front App
|
| - Zendesk
|
| - Streak for Gmail
|
| to handle customer support/customer success, I can tell you that
| Slack is probably not a tool that will allow you to scale!
|
| Here's why.
|
| When you do customer success, you usually have to have multiple
| people in the team handling a customer ticket.
|
| You need to be able to quickly reference other tickets and run
| automation to be effective.
|
| I use Slack daily and have used it since the early days:
| Searching for things on Slack sucks plainly. Threading is either
| you love it or you hate it. You want to flag a message to another
| person -so they can see it later, perhaps because they're in a
| different timezone GOOD LUCK.
|
| A parallel could be this: imagine not having A/C and living in
| hot country like Texas... yeah not fun if you're trying to be
| productive now is it. (source: me, I tried. NOT FUN)
| bachonk wrote:
| Curious to hear - what would make Slack search work better for
| you?
| orliesaurus wrote:
| My number one pain in the butt with Slack search is the fact
| that "advanced" operators or "advanced search" suck.
|
| And I am not talking about the ui: there are multiple
| interfaces to filter/refine your search instead of being in a
| single localized page; additionally it would be better to be
| able to modify your search and view the results side by side,
| so that you immediately figure out if your new search params
| are better than the previous ones without having to go
| through a couple of clicks..
|
| I am so surprised that no one has came up with better search
| in Slack in so many years, I could literally come up with a
| better search spec in less than a month - given search is
| something that is used AT LEAST once a day by people in our
| org
| radres wrote:
| What's wrong with slack search? I generally can find what I am
| looking for?
| blowski wrote:
| It would be nice if it understood natural search. For
| example, "messages Dave sent to me privately last week
| including a URL". But on the whole, it works well enough as
| is.
| autotune wrote:
| I live in Texas, my A/C broke twice last year. Worst two days
| out of the year, had to get a hotel room to deal with it until
| the maint staff fixed it.
| commitpizza wrote:
| Seems nice but I would be afraid of basing my business on another
| product. If successful, there is nothing to say that Slack
| wouldn't simply copy the functionality and launching their own
| feature.
|
| Happens all the time with these popular services within other
| popular services.
| bachonk wrote:
| Platform risk is always there, but we see this as a highly
| targeted use-case outside of their core competency.
|
| The Salesforce acquisition spices things up a bit, but Slack's
| been great at supporting developers in the same way Apple did
| with the App Store
| paxys wrote:
| That's not as much of a risk as people make it out to be. Being
| successful is a good thing, even if you are dependent on
| another platform. As long as you are adding something of value,
| you are more likely to get bought out by Slack than get ripped
| off by them.
| jelling wrote:
| Any plans to expand to Discord? Game developers and others
| working with non-enterprise users have the same problem.
| treis wrote:
| I think end customer support is the wrong audience for this. Few
| of them are going to have a pre-existing Slack relationship with
| your company and you don't really want to make them jump through
| hoops to get support. Think the better target is internal teams
| supporting other internal teams. The "Hi [team X], I'm trying to
| foo the bar..." stuff you get in your public team channel.
| treis wrote:
| Also, the problem I think we all have with Slack is picking the
| important messages out of the deluge. I've been mulling a sort
| of SLA/prioritization tool for Slack messages. Something where
| you could set SLAs like "If my skip level manager DMs me I want
| to respond in 5 minutes" and do the Pagertree sort of
| escalation until I respond.
|
| You can apply this to channels and do more intelligent
| notifications than Slack does. Like if a Director or higher
| posts in your team's public channel then kick off the Pagertree
| notification. Or if a post has gotten 10+ replies in 5 minutes.
|
| Can't tell you how many times I've been late on important
| messages because Slack's notifications are coarse and terrible.
| bachonk wrote:
| Yeah that totally makes sense. I used to work at a big tech
| co where we had a Slack channel for internal users of our
| product, and it was hard to keep up.
|
| Kind of an interesting idea to use different SLAs depending
| on the role of the user who posts. Or maybe exclude people
| who you know won't add anything to the conversation.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Once upon a time, I did customer support at a growing startup.
| The company had a system where each support ticket was tracked in
| SalesForce with a specific ID. In slack, a new thread would be
| spawned with that ID in the title. When we closed the support
| ticket, we would archive the slack thread.
|
| And slackbot would dutifully notify every participant that the
| thread was archived. And there was no way to disable that
| "feature", even after talking to Slack's customer support about
| it.
|
| And it drove me insane.
|
| I had to have slack notifications work, because that was the
| primary method of communication for my workplace. And my
| notification stream was being constantly polluted by slackbot!
|
| ---
|
| The lesson here? Let your users change their fucking settings!
|
| Why is this so hard to understand? You can't decide how a company
| is going to use/abuse your product, and the employee working at
| that company probably can't either. So let them configure your
| product!!
|
| Especially when it comes to notifications. Every app that makes a
| notification should provide settings to disable them _at a bare
| minimum_. How did we get so bad at this? It 's fucking obvious,
| isn't it? Don't you hate having your life get interrupted by some
| bullshit notification you can't disable? How are you OK with
| doing that to anyone else?
|
| Yet somehow this is the norm. Very few sms apps let you mute
| group texts. My Samsung phone buzzes at me in the middle of the
| night _to let me know it disabled some unused apps_. And I can 't
| even disable that notification! How did anyone let that shit fly
| through QA?
|
| ---
|
| Anyway, sorry for getting so upset in public. It's been years,
| and I'm still not over it.
|
| Notifications suck hard, right in your face, and it's for no good
| reason in the first place. I'm tired. Aren't you?
| dpratt wrote:
| The fact that you cannot configure or control Slackbot in any
| way is a _huge_ hole in the Slack feature set. You can't even
| mute it - I cannot say how many times I've been interrupted by
| a useless notification from Slackbot.
| jenthoven wrote:
| Very cool product and demo -- congrats Tom! I'd love to hear your
| thoughts about customer success moving to Slack generally. What
| businesses are your clients, mostly? Is unthread a good fit for
| B2B companies with high ACV?
| bachonk wrote:
| High ACV B2B is right on. The most common customer use-cases
| that we've been seeing:
|
| - Devtool SaaS (engineers want to debug over Slack)
|
| - High-touch SaaS (software with a strong services component,
| like tax software)
|
| - Agencies (sales & marketing agencies use Slack as primary
| ticketings/comms platform)
| rmnoon wrote:
| This is really awesome! A couple questions.
|
| 1. Does the customer have to auth the bot at all?
|
| 2. What permissions does it need?
|
| 3. How's your infosec policy? Have you gone through a SOC2 yet?
|
| 4. What about Teams?
|
| 5. What about single channel guests (our workspace and theirs)?
| bachonk wrote:
| Solid batch of questions!
|
| 1. No they do not
|
| 2. We require quite a few permissions, but they're all
| deliberate and we only use what's absolutely necessary. We laid
| out some detail here: https://unthread-
| help.notion.site/Connecting-to-Slack-36a42b...
|
| 3. Because this derived from a previous enterprise SaaS app,
| our infosec policies are nicely buttoned up. Going through the
| fun of SOC2 now :)
|
| 4. It's coming! The first thing we're building is a relay so
| you can use Slack to talk to customers in Teams. Down the road,
| we'll consider building the same inbox functionality native to
| Teams, but we're waiting to see demand first.
|
| 5. Yes this works! You can even treat your team members as
| customers for internal ticketing systems (like IT or HR
| requests).
| rebyn wrote:
| Silly ask but is this similar to Atlassian Assist?
| https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1220442/atlassian-ass...
| artembugara wrote:
| Great product. Once we have more clients, I would totally love to
| use your product. We find Slack is the best to work with other
| teams.
| eliannag wrote:
| same thought over here - love the product only problem I have
| is that there is no way for me to 'grow in to' unthread unless
| I'm a larger company from the start. Would love a freemium tier
| for the little guys, but also get why at this stage you might
| not have it :)
| bachonk wrote:
| That makes a ton of sense. We currently have a freemium with
| 1 free channel, but could be good to increase that limit so
| you can get it into your workflow early on
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