Afterpay set up a dedicated Slack channel to help hundreds of new hires brought on in the past year access human resources and IT support services.
Enterprise technology director Simon Gowland told a Slack Frontiers APAC conference that the buy now pay later (BNPL) provider saw alternatives such as email as “too slow and cumbersome” for staff communication.
Afterpay significantly scaled up its use of Slack as lockdowns hit in March 2020, initially as the primary channel to log IT support requests globally.
“[The] global IT support channel was created last February and that’s been one of our biggest wins to date, to have one place where people could actually come in and either look through and see where other people have had issues and piggyback off the back or log in the request for help,” Gowland said.
With Afterpay continuing to grow through the pandemic, IT also needed a way to engage with new hires to onboard them to Afterpay’s corporate systems.
About 300 new employees have been onboarded and provisioned remotely over the past year, including 40 over the Christmas period.
Gowland said Afterpay created a dedicated Slack channel just for new hires to access additional IT or HR support.
He added that Afterpay has since started to build some sophistication into Slack for global IT support, connecting the channel to ServiceNow to automatically generate tickets.
“Our most recent and largest integration has been our ServiceNow integration for our IT support team,” said Gowland.
Gowland added “the ultimate outcome” from adopting Slack and connecting it with ServiceNow is that internal customers’ problems are resolved faster.
“The other key around that is being able to escalate to someone in either a different region, timezone, or just to a more senior person,” he said.
This has been particularly important “because people can ask a question [in Slack], and someone else from a different area can respond to it.”
