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Feedback on Side Conversations for Slack



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Toby Sterrett

Zendesk Product Manager

Posted Jun 13, 2019

Now that Side Conversations for Slack is generally available to all accounts with the Collaboration add-on, please leave any questions or feedback you may have here.


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10 comments

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Dan Cooper

Community Moderator

Overall, I'm really impressed with what I'm seeing so far in my testing.  The one area where I'm a little concerned is when someone continues a thread after marking the side conversation as done.  I wasn't seeing a way to be notified that the conversation had continued easily.  Some of the teams I can see collaborating with using this would likely not know that the conversation had ended.  Would it make sense to call out that the conversation has been closed on the Zendesk side as a thread post in Slack.  This way the person replying knows that no one is monitoring the conversation closely or at all anymore?

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Toby Sterrett

Zendesk Product Manager

Hey Dan, good point! One idea we had was to use reactjis on the first message in the thread with something like a ✅ icon to indicate that the thread was considered "done". We could potentially also edit the first message to add a "status" line to it or something like that. Does your team have any sort of convention for indicating that a Slack thread is "done" and no longer requires any further replies?

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Dan Cooper

Community Moderator

I don't know that a reactji is explicit enough to indicate that the next comment in the thread may go to no one.  Since you can't stop someone from replying to the thread, I'd put a system generated message with something like This conversation has been marked complete in Zendesk. A reactji on the thread can be a great secondary indicator that the thread is complete. 

I see this being used for communicating with internal teams that don't necessarily use Zendesk or care that we do.  I don't want them to have to think about if they should reply or not.  It should be clear that replying may not be a good idea at a certain point.

I haven't seen much consistency in how Slack threads are used.  Many users don't thread at all, some use reactji to confirm completion, but this seems rare. In the scenario where users don't thread at all, it might be worth specifically calling out that replying to the thread will update the ticket. 

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I would really like to be able to tag slack users via side conversations. It feels inefficient and somewhat defeats the purpose to use side conversations and then have to go back into slack and add the tag of the individual or team you need's attention.

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Agree on @ mention tags for Slack in side conversations.  It technically kind of works if you have a simple call-out name but there isn't an auto populated picker.  For example @penland works in our organization.

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Heather Rommel

Zendesk LuminaryThe Product Manager Whisperer - 2021Community Moderator

I was just going to create a new thread, but since this exists, I'll just add my $0.02

Assignee creates a slack side conversation from their ticket using a macro so we can set the right channel and prompt for the right information

The assignee HAS TO CLICK SUBMIT even through the side convo is started in order for my macro tag to apply and in order for any fields to be set. Yuck! If they don't, reports and views don't work well.

The assignee has to MANUALLY OPEN the ticket and side convo to see if there are any replies. We want notifications in zendesk that a new comment has been added to a side convo on my ticket.

In fact, I want to be able to give them views like "tickets with replies on my side convos" but it's a struggle because if the agent switches to Slack and makes comments there (so that they can be alerted on future comments in the string which is the missing feature in zendesk) then any trigger I add will falsely add a tag because zendesk doesn't know their comment in slack is the same user as the assignee.

So basically we want:

Custom tags on tickets where side conversations are started without making an Agent click submit since the side convo is started without clicking submit... 

Notifications when my side convo is updated. In Zendesk. And if I miss the notification because it disappears, give me a place to go see all my notifications and x them out when I'm done reading up on them. This way I don't have to switch from zendesk to slack and back all the time

A way to @ mention users. I know this is hard, but can we store the Slack user name on the agent profile and zendesk then has a way to connect the two systems/users?

Views for Slack side conversations, conditions to view just new ones with no replies, or a new comment was added that I haven't replied to

Thanks for listening!! @...

 

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We would love if it was possible to change the hyperlink text for slack <> ticket conversations.  Currently the hyperlink in slack is the ticket number, but for our use case it would be more useful if we could have the hyperlink text be the ticket title, or some other field of our choosing.  That way it would be easy for others in the org to see what the ticket is about, without needing to go into Zendesk to look at the ticket itself.

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There seems to be nasty bug in this feature. 

If a Side Slack Conversation is revived i.e let's say the Zendesk case is closed and after 3-4 months someone replied on that Slack Thread from Slack itself the Zendesk will open a followup case. Which is very bad. 

We have stopped using this now. 

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Toby Sterrett

Zendesk Product Manager

Heather Rommel we're hoping to integrate with a forthcoming notifications service that would provide a persistent place to see the activity that has happened in your account, including side conversations. As for views, likely not direct views integration, but potentially agent home integration.

Brian Klein thanks, we'll take that into consideration.

Ashok Gangwar out of curiosity, what was happening in that Slack thread that it received new messages so long after the ticket was closed? We can look into making the follow up ticket creation optional, though.

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@... It’s common to revive threads in an organization. Here’s an example scenario:

An agent received a ticket regarding an HTTP 401 error. They initiated a Slack side conversation from Zendesk (ZD), and after some discussion, the issue was resolved, and the ticket was marked as solved (closed after ZD’s retention period).

Now, 2–3 months later, another agent encounters a similar issue from a customer. They find the previous thread on Slack and choose to comment on it to revive the conversation. This can be useful as it connects to a historical discussion, and organization-wide, this practice may be encouraged.

However, if the agent revives the old Slack thread, ZD will automatically create a new case as a follow-up, which is unnecessary.

I’m trying to understand in which conditions ZD creates a follow-up when someone responds to an old side conversation:

1. If the ticket was closed without marking the Slack side conversation as “Done” → In this case, ZD should ideally mark the side conversation as “Done” automatically once the ticket is closed.

2. If follow-ups are created independently of the above, this could be a bug in ZD, requiring a fix to prevent follow-ups from automatically generating when an old thread is revived.

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