Slack collaboration is taking off across the enterprise. In fact, one of our customers recently came to us and asked “How should we think about standardizing on Microsoft Teams vs. Slack?” Given the spend across the two applications and the significant implications of siloed collaboration, it was a critical question — and one that they didn’t quite know how to answer. The customer had already asked users for qualitative feedback on which app they preferred to use and evaluated basic login data though their single sign-on (SSO), but the insights they gleaned didn’t provide any clarity to make a decision on which application they would standardize. In the meantime, the clock was ticking on upcoming renewals for both applications.

With the help of Productiv’s deep, insightful application engagement analytics, the customer was able to examine their application provisioning and make an informed decision on which app they would standardize for their organization.

The first eye-opener was the stark difference between the number of provisioned users vs. the number of engaged users across the two applications. At the time of analysis, there was little overlap when it came to the provisioning of both applications. Said another way, there weren’t many people in the organization who used both Slack and Microsoft Teams. But in terms of the number of people provisioned, it was basically equal — about 1,700 people used Teams and 1,400 used Slack. If we had stopped there, this wouldn’t be a very interesting finding —after all, we can pretty easily uncover those numbers. For that matter, if we just looked at who had used one of the applications in the last 30 days, that wouldn’t be particularly illuminating either. 

Where this got insightful is when we started looking at engagement.

Engagement is what happens after someone logs in, and it’s what businesses are counting on when they make big bets on technology. At Productiv we look at more than 50 engagement dimensions from feature and device use, to the type of activity people are performing, to whether or not collaboration is happening inside and outside of an organization. And as we took a look at engagement in Microsoft Teams vs. Slack, we found that Slack engagement was nearly 10 times greater than in Microsoft Teams.

These engagement analytics made our customer’s decision-making process a lot easier, but it would have likely been a very different if they’d analyzed these two applications without looking more deeply into engagement. We’re glad we were able to shed some light on this for them and provide the decision support they needed.

Are you wondering whether your employees are engaged with their SaaS apps? We offer a complimentary SaaS Value Assessment where we work with organizations for 30 days to dive deep into their application portfolio. This typically results in 6-10 unique findings that range from opportunities to optimize licensing to areas where collaboration is working well and places where it might not be. Let us know if you’d like to get a SaaS Value Assessment for your organization.