5 Must Have Slack Bots For Remote Teams
The use of Slack for team communication can dramatically improve the efficiency and speed of each member of your team by simplifying their day-to-day work.
Slack has a platform that lets a team communicate on various channels. Thereby eliminating the need to communicate through email.
It has a long list of integrations that can post updates within your channels. Companies large and small are using Slack theses days to keep up with their forms of communication.
Below you will find the most useful Slack bots for remote teams.
1. GeekBot.io
It is still in its beta mode, but you can already take advantage of its features to boost your team’s productivity. It is free to use for now.
One of the biggest challenges of remote teams is the different time zones of each member. However, GeekBot will help your team organize asynchronous stand-up meetings.
When a member is online for more than 10 minutes, it will start the “stand-up” meeting. Each member who is online will be asked a set of questions, and GeekBot will collect the data or status report.
Depending on your goal, the data can be used in several ways. You can use it as a newsletter or post it to your channel inside Slack.
With this Slack bot, there is no need to arrange time schedules in order to organize a stand-up meeting. The bot will just ask each member when they’re available, and automatically post an update so every member of the team will be informed of your status.
In other words, Geekbot will help your remote teams with what each member is working on. This can definitely help fix blocking issues that may affect the progress of the team.
2. Chatlio.com
Chatlio focuses on live chat solution. With Chatlio, you will know who you’re chatting with. This is especially useful if you’re chatting with a potential customer, as the bot will automatically present useful pieces of information (location, user ID, email, and browser) about your visitor.
Integrating Chatlio with Slack is seamless, letting you handle various inquiries with less effort for your team.
Although there are other live chat solutions available, Chatlio is quite different because your remote teams can help a site visitor simultaneously. It means that if one of your team members doesn’t know about the issue raised by the visitor, you or another member of your team can answer it.
It’s truly a great form of interaction with your remote teams and with users of your site in real-time. If none of your team members are online, the bot will also go offline. When visitors try to chat, they’ll be prompted for an email address and asked to leave a message.
That said, there’s no need for you and your members to click a button to go offline when there’s no one within your team to accept live chat support. But, as soon as one of your team members is online, the widget will also go back to online mode.
Essentially, Chatlio is a team-based support to provide visitors with valid answers to their inquiries.
3. Heyscale.com
HeyScale’s goal is to enhance your internal communication with your remote teams. With this bot, your remote teams will be reminded of upcoming deadlines and milestones. If you need to send an announcement to certain members, you can do so by sending it at the right time to the right members.
This bot will also send scheduled messages to certain channels or individual team members. To reduce communication noise, you can target announcements to specific team members or groups.
“Recurring Reminders” is another great feature of HeyScale. This will make it easier for you to send out a recurring reminder so you can focus on other things that are essential for your team to grow.
You can also send bulk messages to a group of people as a private chat message. Then keep track of the announcements you have made, find out who can receive them, and when they can obtain the announcements or messages.
4. TextTurner.com
Another useful Slack bot that your remote team would benefit from is TextTurner. With this bot you and your team members will never get lost in translation again.
This is especially useful if some of your team members don’t speak English. This human translation bot can be easily integrated with Slack. The translation is handled by real native speakers and put into context.
With TextTurner, you no longer need to rely on different translators. You just need to put foreign words into Slack so a real person can put them into proper context.
It is extremely easy to use. All you have to do is type the words or sentences into Slack. Within a matter of minutes, one of TextTurner’s human translators will give you a proper translation of the words or sentences you have entered into the language you want them to be translated to.
With this bot, there’s no need for you to worry about language barriers among your team member; they can easily understand your message. No more miscommunication issues within your remote teams.
5. Gdrive2Slack.optionfactory.net
With GDrive2Slack, you can use Slack when you’re communicating with your remote teams and utilize Google Drive in storing your team’s files. This bot will automatically share a new file added to Google Drive to your team’s Slack conversations.
Using this bot with Slack will let you create, collaborate, and store documents online. Letting your team members work on those documents simultaneously. Integrating this bot with Slack allows file sharing to be easy and seamless.
New or edited documents will be available for anyone within your group. This is a big help if you’re dealing with hundreds of documents that require editing by your members. Using Slack as a central communication hub and combining it with Gdrive2Slack will make your remote work more efficient and communication more effective.
The five Slack bots mentioned above are perfect for your remote teams. They can streamline your communication in ways you thought were not possible. In other words, these bots allow you and your team to pull information and activities from external tools into Slack to make team collaboration top notch.
