Growing up together: The evolution of Drift’s Slack app
By: Gregory Li
Tags: Marketing, Apps, Slack, Drift, Developer

Growing up together: The evolution of Drift’s Slack app

When people are working in Slack, they typically want to stay in Slack. That’s why Drift created an app that gives users a simple and intuitive way to get everything they need from our platform — without leaving Slack.

But this wasn’t just built on a whim. It’s the result of years of partnership between Slack and Drift — one that launched in 2017 and refreshed in 2020 with the release of the Slack app toolkit.

Drift + Slack: The early days

In 2017, we built a Slack app using the RTM API, which let users listen for and respond to Drift conversations via webhooks.

Now, Slack is one of the primary ways companies communicate, whether it’s within a team, department, or entire organization. Meanwhile, Drift is now the best way for companies to have ongoing conversations with prospects and customers.

Both platforms help facilitate conversation, but for very different reasons. As a result, we continue to refine the way Drift and Slack complement each other and work together.

For example, while iterating on our Slack app, we created a way for Drift chats to live within a dedicated Slack channel — which seemed like a natural evolution.

However, this feature also became unwieldy, because every new chat within Drift created a new Slack channel. As our customers (and their traffic) grew, channels were proliferating in an unsustainable way.

Redesigning Drift on Slack

We recognized the increased sophistication of our customers and viewed it as an opportunity to develop a more unique user experience. In keeping with our customer-centric principle, we connected with a sample of those who had used our first Slack app. The feedback was clear — they wanted Drift notifications that were highly targeted, relevant, and easy to access within Slack.

Fortunately, Slack made this easier than ever with the recent release of the Slack app toolkit. Our team has built dozens of Drift integrations, and Slack’s documentation is among the best — easy to understand, helpful error handling, and fun to navigate.

Block Kit Builder also simplified the design process by reducing the back-and-forth between design and development teams. We were new to Block Kit and unfamiliar with available components. Our designer used Block Kit Builder to prototype the initial app UI — which also streamlined developer handoff, since Block Kit Builder generates code to match your desired UI.

Tips and tricks

Beyond new platform capabilities, we learned a thing or two about building an ideal app experience for Slack users.

We recommend building your app to support Enterprise Grid from the start. For us, this means storing enterprise_id from the OAuth flow and handling global user IDs — meaning the Slack app home is shared across multiple workspaces.

Definitely request an Enterprise Grid workspace early, so you can test your app’s performance. Consider this at the beginning of development; otherwise, it’s a potential headache retrofit later.

The quality of Slack documentation made it simple to build our Slack app — allowing us to focus on creating a great user experience. This wasn’t just a matter of taking our existing designs within Drift and porting them over to Slack. We developed an intuitive dashboard and notifications, like ‘meeting booked,’ rendered in a way that appeals to Slack users.

The Drift app sending a scheduling confirmation via Slack message.

The work we’ve done extends the value of Drift, so you don’t have to be signed into our platform to get the updates you need. Instead, you can join a conversation quickly — boosting response times and engaging with customers in real-time.

Opportunities for continuous innovation

Since updating and launching our Slack app with the latest platform features, we’ve seen notable traction within our customer base. This confirms that we built something valuable to our users, but we’re not done yet…

We’re working hard to build more notification and alert support in Slack, so Drift users have more options and an even better app experience. As Slack grows, we grow — along with the customers we serve.