Slack eyes India as a potential paid market

Salesforce-owned Slack, the messaging service designed for the workplace, with users in over 150 countries, is eying India as a potential paid market.  According to Slack, India has been one of the largest countries with free user bases for the company and it has now positioned in its top 10 markets for paid teams globally. While the solution was already in use by the regional offices of MNCs in the country, the recent months witnessed Zomato, Dreamsports, Freecharge, Razorpay, and Meesho adopting Slack’s solution.

Slack’s Digital HQ solution enables companies to navigate the transition to a hybrid workplace, which can be used to connect employees, tools, customers and partners by breaking down communication silos and bringing teams together around common goals, projects and processes, the company claims.

For instance, unicorn Meesho is using Slack’s Digital HQ solution to save time, build company culture, streamline processes, and improve the way they work. 

Shikhar Saxena, Group Product Manager, Meesho, explains: “With the pivot towards remote working, multiple apps and systems were a huge hindrance to productivity and collaboration.” He further added that with Slack’s solution, everything happens in one channel, and what used to take a couple of days is now resolved in a matter of hours.

Slack has been operational in India for the last four years. The company established a product engineering team in Pune in 2018 following the acquisition of Astro. And the Slack India team has an employee strength of 120 spread across four offices in Pune, Mumbai, Bangalore and Gurgaon. Founded in 2013, Slack Technologies was acquired by the world’s leader in customer relationship management platform Salesforce in July 2021. Salesforce has been present in India since 2005 with a workforce of over 6,500 employees across Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad.

According to a recent study conducted by the company, with over 2,000 Indian knowledge workers, the findings revealed that 4 in 5 respondents had a desire for flexibility, and a significant 80 per cent would seek a role elsewhere if their employer didn’t accommodate this. And in the same study, Indian knowledge workers said they were wasting an average of 47 minutes a day switching between the various apps they use to do their jobs. One in five respondents said they were losing 10 hours a week – that’s nearly 10 working weeks a year.

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