Locate what you need across all your conversations, apps, and data while staying in the flow of work.
Time is our most valuable asset, but we waste far too much of it sifting through trying to find information. In fact, 20% of the average workweek is spent searching for information. Enterprise search in Slack now brings all your conversations, apps, and data into one intelligent, searchable hub, no app switching required.
Learning the right way to search can give you more time back, and reduce frustration in finding what you need. Ready to optimise your search process? In this post, we’ll share practical tips and expert tricks to help you get the most out of this powerful new feature.
How to get started with enterprise search in Slack
Slack search is where you find conversations and files that have been shared with your team. But information is everywhere, and if you can’t find what you need, you can’t use it to get your work done. That’s why Slack has taken search to the next level, infusing AI-powered search directly into work. Enterprise search extends across all your organisation’s apps and data — helping you find exactly what you need, when you need it, so you can focus on what matters.
1. Search anything, find everything
Connect all of your apps and data. Enterprise search is a single search bar that works across all of your most commonly used apps and data sources, so you never have to leave Slack (and it knows and respects your permissions, too). Click the plus icon next to a data source in the search results, and it’ll search across Salesforce, Google Drive, Microsoft, GitHub, Confluence, Jira, Asana, and Box. (Follow these steps for more detail.) Don’t have these available in your workspace yet? Ask your Admin to enable enterprise search so you can get started.
Ask questions, like you’re talking to a teammate. With enterprise search, knowledge retrieval has transformed into knowledge delivery. You don’t have to know exactly what you’re looking for; instead, you can ask a question in your own words (don’t forget a question mark at the end — it helps!). And the more detail you provide in your question, the better the results you’ll get. Enterprise search understands your questions, connects to your apps and data, and keeps everything secure by checking your access permissions in real-time when it gives you a result.
Provide feedback on results. Enterprise search uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) based on your company’s own data, which provides highly relevant and personalised results for each search. Each time you perform a search, you can give feedback via the thumbs-up or thumbs-down button so we can improve the quality of answers it provides.
2. Ask smarter questions, get more relevant responses
As a child, you learn about the Five W’s: who, what, when, where, why. These are the start to asking questions and getting answers. Slack’s AI-powered search bar works the same way, so all you have to do is think about how you typically ask people questions in conversation, and type that in.
Get specific about what you’re looking for so you get exactly what you need the first time, such as if you know you’re looking for a presentation or a spreadsheet.
Here’s how you might frame questions based on your team:
- Sales: What is the status of the Hawksdale Group deal?
- Engineering: What did we do to solve the outage reported by Acme?
- Marketing: Why did the Starsdale product launch get delayed?
- HR: What is the latest hotel policy from the employee travel guide PDF?
3. Navigate responses like a pro
Based on your search, you might get results back with multiple conversations cited requiring you to dig further to find what you need. Instead, use filters to specify your sources and narrow things down. You can choose a specific source by clicking on the logos on the left-hand side and selecting only those you want to reference. This helps you hone in on the exact content you need.
Another pro tip: If you didn’t quite get a clear answer or the initial search pulled from too many sources, ask follow-up questions of the results to refine your search further.
How to get started
Admins can take simple steps to make enterprise search work for their team:
1. Start with pain points
Talk to different teams to learn why they spend time looking for information–are they getting up to speed on account history, solving customer issues, or onboarding new team members. Ask questions about what is taking them extra time or where they’re finding it challenging to get the information they need. These real examples can give you insights into their pain points so you can provide solutions that meet their needs.
2. Map your most used apps
Use these conversations to identify which systems hold your most valuable knowledge. Connecting the right tools first makes search immediately useful. Setup is simple and takes only a few seconds.
3. Help people ask questions that get them better results
A little training goes a long way. Show teams how to use natural language search to find what they need. Thanks to Google, gone are the days of hunting for file names. Instead you can ask real questions and get a summary back, complete with citations. Bonus points: To help people get the hang of it, post tips and tricks in an internal Slack channel!
4. Empower your organisation to be search-first
Change management can be challenging. Set teams up for success by encouraging them to search first before asking in Channels or DMs. When enterprise search becomes the default way to find answers, knowledge starts flowing faster across the company.