Turning collaboration into completed work.
A busy channel can look like a productive team. Questions get quick reactions, updates keep arriving and everyone appears involved. Yet the customer may still be waiting for somebody to make a decision.
For 2022, I would focus on the distance between a conversation and a completed piece of work. That distance is where ownership gets lost and customers begin to chase.
Connect the conversation to the record
Salesforce completed its acquisition of Slack in July 2021. The combination makes a useful question more immediate: how should collaboration connect to the customer information and processes that run the business?
Consider a service case that needs help from sales. The discussion should point to the relevant case, make the requested decision clear and name the person responsible. When the decision is made, the case should contain the result. The next colleague should not need access to everyone's memory.
That requires a working agreement before it requires an integration. Decide what belongs in a conversation and what must be recorded in the system of record. Then make the transfer easy enough that people will actually do it.
Automate a complete, modest task
A notification is useful only if somebody can act on it. Before adding another alert, ask what the recipient should do, how long they have and how the business will know the task is finished.
An approval request is a good candidate. It can carry the information needed to decide, go to a named role and write the outcome back to the relevant record. Missing information and unavailable approvers need an explicit route too.
Measure waiting time
Count the hours a request spends waiting between teams. Review the items that are reopened because the original answer was incomplete. Look for decisions that repeatedly require the same clarification.
These measures expose problems that message volume will never show. They also give the team a concrete reason to change a process: fewer stalled requests and less work repeated by different people.
Leadership still has to settle competing priorities. If every department optimises its own queue, the customer inherits the gaps. My priority for 2022 would be one cross-team process with a clear owner and a visible finish. Then improve the next one.
Context: Salesforce's July 2021 completion of its Slack acquisition.
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Annual series edition: 5 January. This edition was prepared or revised on 8 September 2026.
