Slack Technologies Inc. is rolling out new analytics and management features to make its team chat service more useful for large organizations.

The enhancements will enable the company to support its most profitable customers more effectively. The updates, announced on Thursday, are headlined by a tool that makes it possible to collect data on how employees interact with messages.

For a given message, Slack can display the number of people who read it, when they read it and what departments they hail from. Slack also shows certain related information such as top replies.

One application the company sees for the data is informing enterprise technology investments. A firm could export information on employee engagement in Slack to an analytics tool, compare it with engagement in rival products such as Microsoft Teams and identify which is most popular with workers. The data also has more everyday uses, such as helping executives find the best time of day to post internal announcements.

A second major focus of the new updates is easing Slack administrators’ work. There’s now a tool that automatically adds employees to chat channels relevant to their roles and a centralized dashboard for managing channels. Slack will also set up an online version of its Slack Certified program, which provides chat administrators training and professional certifications.

The increased support for administrators will boost the company’s customer strategy. The large organizations that have so many channels they need dedicated personnel to manage them often also account for Slack’s biggest subscription deals. By making it easier for administrators to manage large deployments, Slack can give its top customers a smoother product experience.

The company also wants to help enterprises extract more value from their other software-as-a-service investments, namely Google LLC’s Calendar and Microsoft Corp.’s Outlook Calendar. Users can access the two services directly in the Slack interface, but enabling the integration requires a worker to manually link their account. Slack has added a setting that allows administrators to remove this extra step for workers, a convenience it says helped SoFi Inc. increase Google Calendar usage by 790%.

The new administration features are available with Slack’s Grid plan. The analytics data on employee engagement is available in both the Grid and Plus plans, though only customers who use the former can import it via an application programming interface to external analytics tools.

The new capabilities will soon be joined by an integration with Rimeto, an employee directory service Slack acquired this month. Rimeto allows employees at large companies to find colleagues based on criteria such as job title. 

Photo: Slack