Pet Circle boosts productivity with Slack

Leading Australian pet food supplier Pet Circle has experienced rapid growth since its inception in 2011. The company now employs over 700 staff across multiple time zones in Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia, making it one of Australia’s fastest-growing and most recognisable ecommerce brands.

Growing pains

One of the company’s key challenges from a technology perspective during this growth cycle was finding ways to improve collaboration and connection. “Our engineering team was split across countries in multiple time zones. We also needed tools that could resolve issues with the integration across systems and to reduce the amount of time spent switching between windows,” Pet Circle Vice President of Engineering Tony Abi Khalil says. 

Before adopting Slack solutions, the team spent a lot of time switching between screens to find information from various touchpoints, and what they needed was a solution that could reduce the time spent doing this to increase productivity and engagement.

Pet Circle was also using another messaging tool which was really just a simplified chat function with limited abilities. “It was what we needed at the time to support the size of our team, but as we grew as a business, connection, collaboration and speed of response had become vital to us and we needed a solution that would grow with us,” Tony says.

The business implemented Slack around 2016, using a basic form of the platform to keep different departments connected. Since then the platform has scaled seamlessly in line with company growth.

The right solution

Pet Circle now uses Slack as the company’s digital workplace for a whole range of purposes, including:

• To connect and collaborate with teams across functions such as engineering, CX, product, marketing, supply chain, and people and culture. There are different channels set up for different teams and projects so information can be shared as necessary and quickly allowing teams to react in real-time and be more productive.
•  For application and infrastructure performance monitoring within the engineering team, especially after hours when there are few team members on active work. Having alerts and the detail in channels helps minimise disruption. 
• To communicate with external partners and vendors that also use Slack through Slack Connect. For example, for a recent technology town hall Pet Circle created a Slack channel between themselves, the guest speaker and two external partners. Having all the parties in one place made it easier to work together ahead of the event by sharing documents and reviewing agendas. 
• Secure communication. With the privacy and security that's built in you know you can share your files and information without being exposed outside of that channel itself.

“With our hybrid work model, we are always looking for ways to better connect our team whether they are working remotely, in the office, or in a different country entirely. We have a general channel where we share good news, customer feedback, and updates across the different functions. We have a team that loves to share and Slack helps us create spaces for this. For example, with the World Cup on currently we have a whole channel dedicated to the tournament,” Tony says.

Connecting teams in a hybrid work environment    

The Covid pandemic may have upended traditional ways of doing business for a lot of organisations but it reinforced the value of Slack for Pet Circle, given that the team absolutely needed to stay connected.

During the work-from-home period, the tool played a critical role in helping teams work more closely across different locations, Tony says.

“Functions such as Slack Huddles made it so much easier for us to work and keep the team motivated, connected, and productive - and they continue to play a key role as we work within a new hybrid work norm. It’s become the tool of the trade for us and we are always looking at ways to improve our application integration within Slack for greater productivity and customer engagement.”

Additionally, the pandemic brought home the importance of having the right infrastructure solutions in place, with Pet Circle’s incidents process, business updates, release workflows and pipeline all conducted in Slack.

“In the past, an alert would go into an inbox and it could take anything from half an hour to two hours for someone to pick it up as people would be working on different platforms. Now an alert comes automatically into a channel, which will have five to 10 people in it who are accountable, so it gets picked up and triaged in minutes. Having it all integrated means that it’s a lot quicker for a wider range of people to jump on it and to collaborate,” Tony says. 

Improving workflow and customer experience     

Besides promoting greater connection for the wider business, from an engineering perspective, having the single window to work from has become a critical part of Pet Circle’s workflow. It has also helped the company attract the best engineering talent, who want tools that enable them to do their best work.

“When you’re coding you don’t want to have to flick between screens, tabs and windows, you want everything in front of you in one place. With Slack, we get exactly that and you can dedicate yourself to the task a lot more easily. A lot of updates can now be done by automating workflows and that all happens in a single window, so it gives you all that you need at your fingertips,” Tony says.

Additionally, from a customer experience standpoint, Slack solutions have greatly improved speed of response to queries. “We can now give the CX team a heads up even before the customer gets impacted or is aware of an issue.  So from an engineering perspective, our new collective intelligence has made us leaders in how we respond,” Tony says.

“Just last month we were awarded the Canstar Blue Most Satisfied Customer award for the pet store category, which was a great recognition of the work we have done. Using Slack as a tool definitely has a role to play in that, and it reflects on sales and profits.”