Create your dream toolbox
Slack, a cloud-based instant messaging and collaboration tool seemingly on steroids, has been a favorite of American Genius since its beta launch in 2013. Since then, the team messaging app has generated 3 million users, who produce impressive engagement stats and consistently give raving reviews on the app’s abilities and functionalities. These abilities like the organized channels, direct messaging abilities, file sharing, notifications, and universal search function make Slack a cool business tool straight out of the box.

What’s cooler than cool?
Cool is cool, but coolest is cooler, which is why we are equally impressed with Slack’s add-on tools that make it one of the coolest collaborative platforms around.
Whether you are already a Slack user and want to beef up your experience or you’re just now hearing of Slack, keep reading to see all the goodies that can leverage productivity among your business team.

Growth Report
Business owners everywhere understand an entity can’t be much of anything if there is no growth, which is why Growth Report is such a noteworthy tool.
Weekly growth, retention, user behavior, and acquisition numbers are easily tracked and provide businesses insight to their growth or lack thereof.
The report can be accessed from an email sent from Slack, or from the Slack interface directly.

Talkus is a fairly new widget that provides Slack operators a glimpse into how users perceive and view their website through live chat.
Visitors have an option to instant message a support member and receive updated status tickets. Through simple commands, a user can then assign visitors to a team, invite expert teammates to the discussion, and distribute a user satisfaction survey.
Full customization options, email feedback, visitor information, text formatting, and the option to embed images make converting visitors, engaging customers, and managing customer support a breeze in Slack.

Dubbed “Siri for Slack,” Skylar serves as an automated personal secretary that organizes and consolidates users’ information within Slack. With functions like Asynchronous communication, business integration tools, mail forwarding, Google calendar integration, custom question ability, and Dropbox Integration, who wouldn’t want a Skylar on their team?
She even has the capacity to work outside of the Slack interface for work related and non-work related to-do’s, like ordering food and sending you the bill within Slack. There are different pricing plans for Skylar, but don’t fret on cost; with the amount of time Skylar saves, you’ll make that money back in no time.

Hamster Pad is a comprehensive list of which chats are trending at the moment, how many people are in each chat, and how many are actively online. Users can find balance between promoting their product and engaging targets to gain success through a community identified by Hamster Pad as trending.
Another one of our AG writers said this tool’s dedicated communities reminds her of subreddits, but with real-time messaging.

Basic spell check is neat and all, but Nurtz is way neater in that it lends a human proofreader to any text within Slack. Users can actually send a message to a human without leaving the Slack platform.
When the text is ready, your proofreader will message you back an edited copy.
The first 100 words are completely free and we encourage you to check it out for yourself. If spell check is your “thing”, we guarantee Nurtz is your next best thing.

If a personal assistant tool and human proofreader weren’t enough to help Slack users collab like the bosses they truly are, then Birdly might do the job. This Slack add-on offers financial assistance through the managing of expenses. Users first upload expenses from their phone, computer, or tablet (i.e. receipts and invoices).
The data is then analyzed and Birdly creates an Excel spreadsheet in real time, along with a summary that can be separately saved. In case you accidentally send in the wrong expense, a REAL HUMAN BEING will review the message and make sure data is entered correctly. Multiple currencies are also available for International handlings.
Give yourself some Slack
Slack is cool, but slack with add-on’s are cooler. We encourage you to take advantage of Slack for free, along with the aforementioned tools to improve both productivity and communication among your team
#SlackRoundup