What Is a Slackbot and How Can You Use It to Make Money? Slack chatbots, also known as Slackbots, can be designed to undertake a huge variety of tasks.
By Murray Newlands Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Chatbots are often considered self-serving tools customers use to obtain answers to their questions. Today, these bots are used for a variety of reasons, some of which include helping with marketing and sales processes; some can even acting as personal assistants to teams across a variety of departments.
Chatbots are being integrated into numerous channels of internal communications, one of which is Slack. Slack has become one of the most popular channels for teams to communicate about projects. The platform now has more than two million daily active users. As a result, it has also jumped on the chatbot train, allowing companies to integrate these assistants into their conversations to lend a helping hand.
What is a Slackbot?
Slack chatbots, also known as Slackbots, can be designed to undertake a huge variety of tasks. From acting as email management tools, sending reminders and notifications to team members, gathering and analyzing data, and even boosting company morale, the opportunities are endless.
Slackbots are no different from typical chatbots; they're just found solely in Slack. These bots can be powered by rules or artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning.
Slackbots can perform a range of revenue-generating activities while saving you money on resources. Here are five ways Slackbots can be used as money-making tools:
Related: 10 Ways Slackbots Will Change the Future of Work
1. Acting as a direct sales channel.
Slackbots can integrate with other platforms to help teams generate more sales. These bots integrate with project management software, CRMs and a variety of other processes used to close sales. They also improve visibility between sales, marketing, customer care, and product design, which allows everyone to work towards a common goal.
In addition to integrating with a diverse list of tools to aid teams in completing more sales, Slackbots can act as direct sales assistants. They can sell goods and services, allowing employees to place orders for food, taxis, and other services without them having to leave their Slack channels.
Taco Bell is the perfect example of how Slackbots act as direct sales channels. The AI-powered bot was designed to prevent people from working hungry, and can now be incorporated into Slack channels. Other companies, such as 1-800-Flowers, Uber and Lyft, also allow people to place orders directly from their Slack channels while at work.
Related: How to Make A 'Slackbot' for Free Without Coding
2. Offering bot-only promotions
Another way Slackbots can be used to make money is to create promotions that are only accessible to customers placing orders through the bot itself; these may include free deliveries, discounts, or coupons. These are all solid ways to boost sales and user engagement.
3. Providing paid subscriptions services
You can now create a Slackbot that provides a paid subscription service, which is not only the most popular way of driving revenue through a Slackbot, but also the most effective. Simply put, the Slackbot is employed to provide an ongoing service for which users pay a subscription on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis.
Whatever the Slackbot's intended purpose, it can be implemented for free with the opportunity to upgrade. Each plan will have its own set of unique benefits. A good example of a Slackbot that uses this method to drive revenue is Growbot. While the majority of its features are free, there's a paid subscription with specific benefits for larger enterprises and HR departments.
Related: Top 10 Best Chatbot Platform Tools to Build Chatbots for Your Business
4. Acting as a referral tool
In addition to acting as a direct sales channel and completing transactions, Slackbots are able to make referrals. A Slackbot can help you make a final buying decision and will refer you to the merchant to complete your purchase. The Slackbot will then receive a referral fee for leading you to the merchant in question.
Related: Enterprise Chatbots and the Conversational Commerce Revolutionizing Business
5. Extending to new platforms
Extending to new platforms boils down to market research. You need to know where your audience is in order to reach them. Take Trello, for example. The project management tool identified that a large proportion of its audience communicates through Slack. As a result, it introduced a Slackbot into the mix, allowing teams to continue their conversations through Slack while monitoring project tasks through the Trello bot.
By extending your service through a Slackbot, you'll increase engagement while mitigating the risk of any competing products or services. In order to extend to new platforms, you must ensure that your Slackbot is:
- Contextual and actionable
- Designed to be as functional as possible
- Not too complex for users to navigate
- Valuable to the user's current experience on Slack
Related: Make Chats With Chatbots Work
Charging for your Slackbot
You can't start charging for your Slackbot's services right away. It's important that you reach product-market fit before you even consider asking for a monetary investment from your audience. The only way you'll be able to start charging for your Slackbot's services is if users:
- Already gain value from your product or service
- Use it on a regular basis
- Are hooked to its capabilities and features
You need to be sure that your users love your product enough to eventually pay for it before you start charging them. There are various ways you can hook your audience with your Slackbot, some of which include, but are not limited to:
- Free trials
- Freemiums
- In-bot virtual goods
Saving money with Slackbots
In addition to Slackbots acting as revenue-generating tools, they can help you save both time and money. Slackbots can act as virtual assistants, taking on some of the more mundane and repetitive tasks that are important, yet time-consuming.
These Slackbots give back time to employees to focus on activities that boost your bottom line. They're also a great way to get more hands on deck without going through the long and expensive hiring process.
How to create your own Slackbot?
Luckily, creating a Slackbot is easier than ever. Today, thanks to platforms like ChattyPeople, you can create an AI- and NLP-powered chatbot in a matter of minutes, even if you don't have any coding or programming knowledge.
The platform's powerful visual dashboard makes it easy to analyze and optimize your chatbot. Plus, because it's completely free to begin, you can create numerous versions of your Slackbot before launching your final one.
Finally…
While Slackbots are able to act as virtual assistants can help with a variety of day-to-day tasks, they're also awesome revenue-generating tools that can boost your bottom line. Use some of the strategies mentioned above to turn your Slackbot into a money-making machine that your audience can't live without.
