Cut yourself some Slack: Avoiding notification fatigue in a ping-happy world

In the past few years, and especially since COVID-19, notifications have taken over our lives. The average person checks their phone 96 times a day, or once every ten minutes! Not only does this have an impact on productivity, but it also drains energy and focus thanks to the costs of frequent context switching.

But what can you do? Work today takes tons of collaboration, and that means many different types of communication, right? Whether its email, text, calls, video meetings, Slack, other collaboration apps, productivity tools, and online communities.

One answer is to reduce notifications by integrating platforms. Many people do this by integrating Apps into Slack such as Google Drive, Office 365, and Asana. Now you can do the same with Khoros Communities!

Slack has rapidly become one of the most popular digital tools for connecting and communicating with others, largely because channel-based messaging is so easy and fast. Many companies use it for internal employee communications, while others create more inclusive spaces for customers and the general public with a shared interest — their community. One example Slack Community I like is the CMX Community Manager Hub.

At the same time, many brands are seeking to connect broader segments of their employees, customers, and partners with each other to drive a more agile and distributed experience - i.e. creating communities.

So companies want to get more people using more tools because individually, there is more efficiency. But adding another communication tool doesn’t always mean greater engagement overall and efficiency. To avoid fragmenting communication and hampering knowledge management, the key is not to add new platforms, but to integrate existing ones. Turn two notifications into one. Also, make notifications interactive so you are not requiring people to click through a notification and open up a new window in order to respond!

"We’re really excited to be fully integrated with Slack. By streamlining notifications and making them interactive we will see expanded engagement overal. We are excited to be working together with Slack to build a more connected experience for employees and customers."
-Nick Hill, GM of Khoros Communities

Slack is a leader in making teams more efficient and connected, so we’re proud to unveil a new way to connect people around a shared purpose. The Khoros Communities integration with Slack will change the way people engage with both platforms, accelerate the overall response rate for any question, and increase the breadth and depth of connections between brands, their customers, and all the people in a community.

And the best part? We’re doing this at no cost to our Khoros Communities customers. It’s an integration that you can take advantage of right now, to drive engagement and success in your brand’s community. Now, let’s see how it works.

We recently released a Slack app called Community by Khoros. The app will be a bridge between your slack workspace and community platform, a one-stop solution that enables you to interact with your community without actually visiting it.

This integration is now free in every Khoros-powered community.

Setup is simple: an IT team and a community admin can easily connect the APIs and exchange security tokens to connect your Slack space with your Community. From there, any community member who wants to use the Community by Khoros app can simply enable it in Slack and set up community notifications.

This will allow community members to:

• Receive instant Slack notifications for activity in a board, post, or thread that they have subscribed to.
• Receive instant Slack notifications any time they’re mentioned in the community.
• Reply to boards, posts, or threads directly from Slack, without having to login to the community.
• Search something in the community using a slash command from their workspace.

Want to learn more about how to integrate Slack into your Khoros community? Check out the discussion on Atlas.

What can integrating your brand’s Khoros community with Slack actually accomplish? Here are a few of the benefits that brands can see from this integration.

Respond more quickly to community inquiries

Community managers, who are constantly managing and monitoring, want to remain updated with the type of content being posted on their communities. They also want to ensure timely responses to member queries, even when they’re not present in the community. Proactive and increased engagement in a community augments brand credibility. With the new integration, community managers can respond to queries without having to leave Slack, saving them time and maximizing efficiency.

Bring your community into your workspace

This integration isn’t just for community managers. With the Community by Khoros app, anyone can get instant community notifications. This means all the Subject Matter Experts from across the company (or public Slack space) can respond faster and more easily to any question asked or blog comment from a customer.

And with the new Khoros Community Syndication, that means you can make far more of your digital spaces interactive in order to build community wherever you are.

Avoid common Slack questions and build knowledge faster

The next big advantage of the integration is the ability to conduct simple, community-wide searches. Slack channels tend to form around specific topics: “how our product works,” “social media strategy,” “lunch discussions” — or for specific teams: “marketing,” “web design,” “ping pong.”

This separation of teams is important for organizing discussions, but it can also fragment information and make it difficult to find. Enabling simple search queries helps solve this problem by bringing the vast, organized knowledge of the community right into Slack. And with slash command search capabilities, users can get information even faster than they would on the community itself.

Instead of asking a common question and having to wait for a response, a user can type “/community search how does this work” and get up to thirty results! Then, they can click through and either find their solution or continue the discussion on the community where it can be found by any future searches — from Slack or anywhere else. This is helpful not just to reduce Slack overload, but to drive further traffic and engagement in the community.

Slack is a powerful digital space where people network, connect, and share information — and so are online brand communities. But these spaces are only as strong as the number of connections they contain. Connecting an entire Slack community to a brand-owned Khoros community doesn’t just increase the users and knowledge of each; it also makes it easier to connect to those users and find that knowledge. This strengthens your brand’s community of employees, customers, and partners, and can help drive important KPIs and business metrics.

We’re (obviously) very excited about this integration, and we can’t wait to hear what our customers and partners think about it — and how they’re going to use it to strengthen their communities. So, how do you plan to use this new capability in your brand’s community? Join the conversation today in Atlas.