When using the Slack for Zendesk Support integration, you can set up triggers to notify Slack users about Zendesk ticket events in specified Slack channels.
This article covers the following topics:
- Creating triggers for Slack ticket notifications
- Using Markdown to format text and alert users in Slack
- Managing Slack triggers
- Converting legacy Slack notifications to Zendesk triggers
Related articles:
Creating triggers for Slack ticket notifications
Remember that before you can create a trigger, you need to add the app to the Slack channel where you’d like to send the notification. You must be an admin or an agent in a custom role with permission to create triggers.
- In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules >
Triggers. - Click Add trigger.
Alternatively, you can copy an existing trigger and modify it.
- In the Trigger name field, enter a name for the trigger.
We recommend including the Slack channel in the trigger name to help identify it. Example: Slack trigger: New ticket for #delivery-support
- (Optional) Enter a Description for your trigger to provide details
about what the trigger does.
Example: "Notifies all users in the #delivery-support channel when a new ticket is assigned to the Support group."
- Select an existing Category for your trigger or create a new one.
We recommend creating a Slack category for your Slack triggers. If you converted legacy Slack notifications to triggers, a Slack category was created for you during the conversion.
- Click Add condition to set up the trigger to meet All or
Any conditions.
Conditions are the qualifications needed for the trigger to fire.
- Select a Condition, Field operator, and Value for each
condition you add.
The field operator determines the relationship between the condition and the value. For example, if you select the field operator "Is", your condition must be equal to the value. Different conditions will contain different field operators.
See Building trigger condition statements.
Note: It is recommended to keep your trigger statements simple. The more complicated a trigger is, the harder it will be to troubleshoot and maintain. - Click Add action, then select Notify Zendesk integration and
Slack integration from the drop-down lists.
- In the Slack channel field, select the channel you want notifications
posted in.
Only channels that the Zendesk app has been invited to appear in the drop-down list. To see additional channels here, add the app to those channels.
The Slack channel list includes private channels that you (the current admin) are a member of. If the app is a member of a private channel that you're not a member of, you won’t see it here until you are also invited to that channel. If you don't see your private channels in Zendesk (and you do see them in Slack), make sure you added the Zendesk app to these channels. Also, ensure that your default email in Zendesk matches your Slack email address.
If you are editing a trigger and don't have access to a private channel listed here, "Private Channel" displays in this field, but you can still edit and save the trigger.
- Use static text and placeholders in the
Notification header and Notification body fields to create
the notification.
A simple notification header and body have been created for you. You can use these as-is or modify them. You can also use markdown to alert channel members or format text in Slack.
Below is an example notification header and body configured in a trigger and the resulting notification in Slack.
- Click Create.
Your new trigger is added to the end of the list of triggers. You can reorder the list of triggers or edit any trigger.
Using Markdown to format text and alert users in Slack
Slack supports Markdown, which is a formatting syntax for plain text. For example, if you surround a word in asterisks (*like this*), it appears bold in Slack.
Slack also supports user @mentions and alerts, which can be especially useful in ticket notifications. For example, add <!here> in the message header to alert all members of the Slack channel when a notification is posted.
The table below includes the Markdown formatting you can use in the Notification header and Notification body of your Slack triggers.
| Type | Markdown | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Italics | _italic_ |
italic |
| Bold | *bold* |
bold |
| Strikethrough | ~strike~ |
 |
| Emojis | :smile: |
 |
| Channel alert (notify channel) | <!here> |
Notifies all members of the channel. |
| User mention |
To notify user ID U024BE7LH:
|
Links to the mentioned user’s Slack profile, and the mentioned user is notified. |
| Group mention | To notify everyone in the delivery-support channel:
!subteam^
is required before the channel name. |
Links to the mentioned group’s Slack profile, and all members of the mentioned group are notified. |
Managing Slack triggers
View your Slack triggers on the Triggers page, where you can manage your existing triggers and create new ones.
See Opening and viewing your triggers list for more information on accessing and taking action on triggers.
Converting legacy Slack notifications to Zendesk triggers
When you convert your legacy notifications, triggers are created in their place. The functionality will remain the same unless you modify the triggers. No downtime is required, and your end users won’t be affected.
To convert your legacy Slack notifications to triggers
- In Admin Center, click
Apps and integrations in the sidebar, then select Integrations >
Integrations. - In the Slack section, click View.
- Click Configure under the name of the Slack workspace to configure.
- Click Convert notifications in the banner.
The banner appears only if legacy notifications exist.
A progress icon appears as the conversion runs. You’ll see a message when the process is complete.
When the page refreshes, the converted notifications appear in the trigger list with the default name Slack Trigger <channel name>. You can now edit the triggers if you’d like. For example, you might want to customize the notification messages.
47 Comments
Hi David
Yes, have had that app for years and still do. Managed to get it working now by creating various new triggers. Seems that Convert Notifications only created a rather nonsensical lone trigger. Which was odd.
Notifications now being received in Slack again.
I have changed my Zendesk agent's name and email address, and now I want this name change to show in the Slack interaction.
But this is not happening. The account's old name keeps showing in the Slack updates, instead of the new one.
I have been up and down all over the integration, and I can't fins any place where this is "hard coded" or any such thing. Is this coded into the integration when it gets created the first time? Or is there a way for me to achieve this - other than tearing down the current integration and start over? (problem here is that I don't have admin rights to the Atlassian side, and it will probably take me a long time to coordinate with other admins for this to happen).
David Rose, how did you make out with the '-truncated message' addition? Any rhyme or reason to it appearing?
How about removing images and tags from the JSON; that is the one part that I'm still struggling to remove from our slack notifications. As you mentioned, when clients have all of their social media icons listed in their signature block, the channel fills up with a ton of useless noise.
Phil Andrews - What you are looking to do is possible. If you are part of Support Driven Slack, you can see a complete walk through of how that would be done, but the pieces that are necessary to make that happen are to have a custom field on the user object that contains the slack ID of the user and then you can reference {{ticket.assignee.custom_fields.customfieldnameforslackID}} in your triggers/automations. You can then either route the Slack messages to a channel or DM the assignee via a webhook that connects to Slack.
David Rose, I think the "truncated message" oddities may result from the way the original message is being truncated. I would change the 'if' statement to ' if ticket.latest_comment.size > 500', rather than comparing it to the length of the truncated string.
As far as removing images, here is the Liquid markup that I came up with to remove all of the extraneous image tags from the Slack message. You can add any additional logic for truncation and whatnot to the "clean_description" variable at the end.
Here's the logic:
I've tested this through most of the afternoon today and have had good success with cleaning images and other tags out of the ticket descriptions in our Slack notifications.
Hopefully this helps at least one other person besides me.
{% if ticket.description contains '![' %}{% assign description_cleaner_array = ticket.description | split:'![' %}
{% for description_item in description_cleaner_array %}
{% if forloop.index == 1 %}
{% assign clean_description = description_item | append: ' ' %}
{% else %}
{% assign part_two_array = description_item | split:')' %}
{% assign part_two_text = '' %}
{% for part_two_item in part_two_array offset:1 %}
{% assign part_two_text = part_two_text | append: part_two_item %}
{% if forloop.last == false %}
{% assign part_two_text = part_two_text | append:')' %}
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
{% assign clean_description = clean_description | append: part_two_text | append: ' ' %}
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
{% else %}
{% assign clean_description = ticket.description %}
{% endif %}
{{ clean_description | split:'SPLIT TEXT' | first | truncate: 1000 }}
Hi Everyone,
With the release of Slack notifications through triggers last year, we had previously communicated the legacy notifications would be deprecated on March 31.
In order to provide more time to customers to complete the migration, we are moving the deprecation date to September 18, 2023.
We will be publishing a formal public announcement shortly but wanted to give folks in this forum a heads up first.
Thanks for your patience and support with the moving to the new triggers notifications.
David
It would be great for the Zendesk team to give us a way to bring back the "see more" function or native truncation support, or to build us better ways to clean up ticket text such as offering ticket.description.text_only or another way to strip out HTML and other junk.
Thanks to others here for pointers to the Liquid documentation - if you are looking for just a simple way to truncate your Slack notifications, you can replace ticket.description (we prefer latest_comment) with this Liquid statement:
{{ ticket.latest_comment | truncatewords: 100 }}It does seem to be possible to "crash" a trigger using more complex Liquid statements. While I was working on testing a statement that strung together Replace functions to strip out unwanted images and HTML, one version made Zendesk very unhappy, and resulted in all the data being cleared from that particular Trigger Action, leaving it blank.
Is there instructions on how to do this for automations? It seems like it is an older interface and I cannot choose a channel. Is that just broken?
It will not work for automations for they don't have the actions "Notify Zendesk Integration".
Hi Dane,
Are you aware if there are plans to bring Slack notifications to Automations?
Having more feature parity between Triggers and Automations would be great.
Hi all,
we dont have the slack integration into zendesk, we only post from zendesk to slack using webhooks (https://hooks.slack.com/services/etc.)
will this have any impact on us?
Kristie Sweeney David Gillespie - same scenario with Viktor.
We don't have Slack App Integration but rather the Push notifications from Zendesk to Slack? Will this affect or impact us?
Hi Jahn Bronilla,
No, this won't effect the Push notifications from Zendesk to Slack.
Thanks,
David
We are in the same need described by Shane here (https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4963959597594/comments/5156426413594).
The new integration is nice but we have sooooo many notifications throwned in the channel that it's actually unreadable/unusable.
We'd approciate (a lot!) if we could decide NOT to get the updates in the channel, only in the thread.
Thank you in advance
Thank you for your insights and feedback about this feature. I encourage you to create a new post in the General Product Feedback topic in our community to engage with other users who have similar needs and discuss possible workarounds. Conversations with a high level of engagement ultimately get flagged for product managers to review when they go through roadmap planning.
Best,
Paolo | Technical Support Engineer | Zendesk
We have a trigger set up that sends tickets to a channel given certain criteria, but we still have to create a separate side conversation to collaborate on that issue in Slack. Is there a way we can turn that entry in Slack created by the trigger into the side conversation? We want to avoid having multiple threads for an issue and make it easy for agents to coordinate with engineering without needing to leave Zendesk and hunt down Slack threads. Thanks!
Hello David Gillespie, I agree with the others' sentiment on tickets being "Also sent to the channel" as too noisy and makes the channel more cluttered. Maybe instead of removing it completely, why not make it optional to the users? Hope you guys can make some updates on this issue since the integration is really helpful. Thank you!
Please sign in to leave a comment.