LMG bets on Slack as an enterprise platform

Mortgage aggregator LMG has deployed Slack Enterprise to make its internal communications more consistent and to rationalise a hodgepodge of systems used across its operations.

The 5000-broker strong mortgage aggregator, the largest in the trans-Tasman region, said that before introducing Slack Enterprise, the company’s internal communication was spit across multiple messaging platforms.

Simultaneously, the number of systems and tools being used by the company more broadly had started to become unwieldy, growing to more than 200 for its internal operations alone.

Speaking at Salesforce’s Financial Summit in Sydney, LMG’s business enablement general manager Karina Egan said that, having already deployed Salesforce for its CRM, she saw an opportunity for Slack Enterprise to become more than a simple company messaging platform.

“I really wanted to position it as not just a messaging platform but to really see the opportunity that there is within Slack and make it an enterprise platform,” Egan said.

Egan said that the company had been using a “rudimentary” version of Slack in parts of its operation but has been steadily training staff to migrate to the enterprise version of the platform.

“We had been using [Slack] in some of the teams, particularly in product and technology, but outside of that, teams were using email and Google Chat, and WhatsApp and SMS for internal comms ... it was really hard to help some of those teams understand the difference between Slack and other platforms which people think are better,” Egan said.

“Some of them are very similar, some of them don't integrate at all with each other. That meant a lot of context-switching for our teams, a lot of copy and paste in various places and just generally making it hard to get good work done."

For example, she said, company announcements were often reaching staff in inconsistent ways, often having to be copied from one channel to another, such as from Slack to email.

Migrating more staff onto Slack has allowed them to spend less time in meetings or to use the time devoted to them communications more effectively.

“We've had a lot of teams who've either cancel their update meetings or come in for weekly update meetings, or repurpose them, so they're using it for brainstorming a particular challenge or something like that.

The company has also reduced its reliance on email.

“We've significantly reduced the amount of internal email. I think like any of us who don't want to be buried in emails all day and then trying to catch up on things after work, Slack has made it so that there's one place for people to look for company announcements and collaborate with teams,” Egan said.

The company's customers, its brokers and advisors, still typically use email, however it has provided them with instructions on how to forward them into Slack to be addressed by internal LMG groups.

The company is also exploring ways to tighten integration between Slack and its CRM. Its early efforts are currently in user acceptance testing phases, starting with a means for sales teams to update contacts on the road and log their activities using Slack rather than email.  

It’s also in the early stages of moving its IT support ticketing to Slack, a project that could see staff lodge requests exclusively via the messaging platform rather than traditional channels such as its company portal and email.