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Feedback on upcoming Freshservice + Slack Integration

Related products:Freshservice
  • September 11, 2015
  • 21 replies
  • 45 views
F
Contributor

To better support IT agent productivity & improve service levels for requestors, we are working on a Slack-Freshservice integration. 


Here are some of the scenarios we're considering:


- Allowing incident creation on Freshservice, from Slack : Requestors/Agents can create a ticket from a slack channel.


- Allow agents to receive notifications on Ticket Assignment/ updates/ upcoming SLAs etc (based on existing automation rules) on a Slack channel. 


- Agents can push an announcement created on Freshservice to users, on a Slack channel. 


- Send notifications to a Slack channel when a change/problem/release request is created.


We'd love your thoughts/feedback - specifically on whether the above functionality would be valuable to you. Also open to suggestions on any other use-cases you'd like us to consider.


(PS - Thanks Alan Burman for all your inputs! )


- Freshservice Product Team

21 replies

R
Community Debut
  • ricardo
  • Community Debut
  • September 28, 2015

It seems that tickets can only be published in Slack channels, but not in Slack private groups, and the later is exactly what we need.

A
Community Debut
  • amonzur
  • Community Debut
  • October 22, 2015

Hi, how far off is this integration?

The ability to create tickets under a requesters name/email via a message in a Slack channel is something we are desperately looking for.


Additional desired functionality would be to be able to have a private group auto created in Slack mirroring the conversation history in a ticket, with all the CC'd members apart of that group as well as the agent.

Whilst it would make more sense for the agent to remain in FS to reply to tickets, alot of users would find it easier to just use Slack.

A
Community Debut
  • agee
  • Community Debut
  • November 10, 2015

any updates on when this will be implemented?


We have tried using webhooks, but it doesn't work.


All of the scenarios mentioned would be useful. 

E
Contributor
  • elizabeth.toy
  • Contributor
  • November 12, 2015

Would love to have notifications to a Slack channel for new problem, change, and release tickets. And if it could send ticket SLA/response reminders, that could be helpful (or a nuisance, depending on the day, ha).

V
Contributor

Thanks for all your inputs (helps a lot) - Ticket creation from Slack and Ticket notifications to a Slack channel seem to be the most desired request. I'll keep you all posted once we kickstart the development which is not far away. 


Viminya

Freshservice Product Team

V
Community Debut
  • vladimir.tidra
  • Community Debut
  • January 27, 2016

 

 

Is there any term forecast you release the integration with slack?
M
Community Debut
  • michael_13337
  • Community Debut
  • February 9, 2016

Can't wait for this integration!! This will really improve our workflow as we're trying to unify all communication into Slack. 

V
Contributor

@Michael- Glad to hear that. We've started the development.


@Vladimir- We'll have the integration ready by Q2 or early Q3.


Viminya

Freshservice Product Team

M
Community Debut
  • melissa.enders
  • Community Debut
  • February 24, 2016

This is a great integration!!!  I'm really looking forward to this release.  My company would benefit hugely from this!!


Can't wait for this to be released!!


Hopefully it is soon!!! 

B
Contributor

We would like to also see the ability to chat with requesters about a new or open ticket and then save the chat into the ticket notes.

T
Community Debut
  • thomas_14170
  • Community Debut
  • June 18, 2016

Any timeline update on this ?

V
Contributor

@thomas- It will be live by next week.

Z
Community Debut
  • zuriel
  • Community Debut
  • June 23, 2016

Wonderful....I can't wait to integrate the two.

V
Contributor

Hi Everybody,


Slack integration has been released :) Thank you for being patient with us. Please refer this solution article to set it up and contact me at viminya@freshdesk.com if you have any feedback.


Thanks

Freshservice Product Team

Z
Community Debut
  • zuriel
  • Community Debut
  • June 29, 2016

Excellent, I already have mine up and running.  Thanks again.

B
Contributor

Great start to the Slack integration. I imagine there are more features forthcoming? I wanted to add two that came to mind immediately.


1) Ability to start a Slack DM with the end user/requester and save back the conversation to the ticket from the time the Slack was initiated until a command is given, i.e. /freshservice-save


2) The documentation states "When someone sends you a message stating their issue on Slack via Direct Messages(DMs), simply type in the command /freshservice-ticket and hit Enter. Et Voila! The messages sent and received 24 hours prior to entering the command would be captured and converted into a ticket in Freshservice."


Two problems I see with this.


a) The probability that the messages from up to 24 hours ago apply to the ticket is not high. It is more likely a Slack conversation of 5 minutes will turn into a ticket for further research and resolution. If a user initiates multiple conversations in a period of 24 hours, all messages would all be saved back to a single new ticket.


b) End users/requests are not supposed to message/email individual users if there is a support question. It is more likely to have a public support channel, i.e. #tech-support, that multiple techs are able to respond to, whomever is on duty. But this public channel could get messy fast...https://goo.gl/HguR6P


Ideally though, an end user/requester could have the option to open a chat with the support tech(s) on duty. Slack or Freshservice would know who is on duty (probably via a command entered). A new Slack message would be queued to the next available tech. Something like...http://get.slaask.com/


Bottom line. Slack for notification of new tickets or updates is great, but for chatting with requesters, I think more than the current feature is needed before we'd adopt for end user chat support.

A
Community Debut
  • amonzur
  • Community Debut
  • June 30, 2016

Hi great to see its here, but I think it needs a little work:

  • For the agent to have to type in "/freshservice-ticket" on each interaction feels and sounds cumbersome. It means that ticket creation from Slack is entirely dependant on the agent on the other end.
  • What I'd prefer to see is the end user be able to DM the FreshService Bot, then create the ticket themselves by completing the message with "/freshservice-ticket". 
  • Ability to rename the bot and commands to suit our support desk syntax would be hugely beneficial in driving adoption.
  • It would make more sense to cap the 24 hour message limit for ticket creation down to 10 minutes at most.
Currently in its current state we wouldn't roll this out as it would be seen as more of a cumbersome burden on the support them than an aide to provide better support with.

Excited to see where this goes, keep it up.

A
Community Debut
  • amonzur
  • Community Debut
  • June 30, 2016

Also, the ability to use different commands instead of /freshservice-ticket or different bots, to assign to different groups would be extremely beneficial.

V
Contributor

@ZurielReyes - Great to know that!


@Brendon McCarthy and Amonzure - Great suggestions. I have tried to address each of your feedback, do checkout out my comments below.


Ability to start a Slack conversation from the ticket page is a great feedback. We will take it up in our next enhancement.


The rationale behind having 24 hour timeframe is to give more leeway to agents incase the agent sees the messages 10 minutes or an hour later. The best would be to make it configurable. We will definitely revisit this and come up with a best possible fix.


In case of public channels, conversations are many-to-many, it would be difficult to capture the right context, hence we support ticket creation only from DM.


As we’re programmatically creating bot and commands, it is not possible to custom name them. We will see if we can keep the names generic.


We had a constraint in enabling end-users use slack command as Slack allow only authenticated users to slash command. And authenticating all end-users via Freshservice cannot be supported, hence we are authenticating only agents.



Viminya

Freshservice Product Management

B
Contributor

Thanks @Viminya for the reply. Why it works the way it does right now is helpful. For us, we need a support chat feature in FreshService (FreshDesk has had one for a long time). We thought some sort of integration with Slack might be able to provide some form of this, but ideally a web-based chat support tool would work best. If this web-based chat creates a private DM with the support agent assigned (on duty), then the Slack integration as is current could probably work. At the end of the day though, however it is implemented, we require a support chat tool that does not require the end user/requester to have Slack.

M
Community Debut
  • michael_13337
  • Community Debut
  • July 14, 2016

Brendon - Take a look at Chatlio - https://chatlio.com. That's what we've been using to provide a live support tool that integrates with Slack. It works great although we still have to take that and manually create a ticket in FS. 

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