Notify Slack when a new post has been added to a community topic (using Zapier)
So you want to notify your team in Slack whenever there's a new community post in your Help Center.
This tip shows you one way of achieving this using:
- A Zendesk user that has subscribed to the topics you want notifications from
- A Zapier Zap that parses the email notification and only delivers its essential content to Slack
Dan Ross has an alternative way of doing this that uses the native Email to Slack feature in Slack.
The main benefit of the Zapier way is to limit the Slack message to a few essential elements, instead of the whole email notification.
Create a Zendesk user and have them subscribe to the topics you want notifications from
For the sake of brevity, I'm not going to flesh out all the details here, but just indicate the steps involved.
- Create the user and use an email you have access to, so you will be able to login to the Help Center Community.
- Log in to the Help Center Community with this new user and go to the community:
- Subscribe to all the topics you want to follow.
Create a Zapier Mailbox
This part assumes you already have a Zapier account set up and you are logged in.
- Go to Email Parser by Zapier and create your mailbox
- Copy the email presented to you and go back to the Zendesk user you created before
- Change the email of your Zendesk user (the community subscriber) to the one given by Zapier
- As a user other than you subscriber, create a new community post so Zapier has some content for you to work with for the next step
Select which parts of the email notification you want for your Slack notifications
- Go back to the Email Parser which by now should have the message triggered by the new community post.
Highlight the parts of the message you want. I chose the very first text string which contains the Topic name and the Post title and the link to the post for this example.
Give them names and save so you can find them later. When finished click the Save Address and Template button. - On the next page, there should be a link to use this app in Zapier click that.
Setup your Zap
- Give your Zap a name and Choose Email Parser as your trigger
- The trigger should be a new email, you may need to connect your account before you can select the mailbox. Select the mailbox you created and continue.
- Select Slack as your Action and go through the steps - select Send Channel Message.
- When you get to the template step you select the channel you want to receive notifications on and configure the elements of the message
The message text is where you use the highlighted elements from earlier to include in the message. I chose to hyperlink the Post title like so:
<LINK-ELEMENT|TITLE-ELEMENT>
That's a <, the link element, a pipe (|), and then the title element inside a >.
For context, I also preceded the above with:
*New Community Post* :mailbox_with_mail:
- There are a lot of other optional settings, I chose to disable Auto-Expand Links for more compact messages, but you may want that for context.
Enabling Auto-Expand will look something like this:
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This is awesome! Thanks for sharing, Jacob!
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Love it! Thanks, Jacob.
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Thanks so much! this worked well! the only issue I had is getting the links to expand for a preview! My workaround was just adding the parse for the comment. I just worry about it being super long though....
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Hi Janiece, so glad you found this helpful!
That seems like a good idea if you want all the details in the Slack notification, but as you say it could also get quite long.
Did you try to enable the Auto-Expand Links setting I mentioned at the end of the post?
That should give you the first 200 characters of the comment.
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