Our Build-in Slack notifications for agents are great but what makes the Slack integration really powerful is the ability to build custom notifications using LiveAgent rules.
When creating a rule in LiveAgent you will see an option called "send Slack message" in the action part of the rule. This allows you to trigger a Slack notification whenever rule conditions are met. The notification can be either sent to a specific channel in your Slack workspace or a specific user of your Slack workspace.
Let's take a look at a few examples of such rules that we find useful for our support team.
Send Slack notification when chat, call or ticket queue is higher than X
This rule can be really useful if you want to notify your other employees or even managers that the chat/call/ticket queue reached a defined threshold.
As you can see on the screenshot below the rule is triggered whenever a queue is changed and the actual queue length is higher than 5. The rule action is to notify our Support channel in our Slack workspace so that other members of our support team that are currently not on chat duty can help out with the chat queue. The actual message is also customizable with various parameters which depend on the rule trigger. In this specific case, we pass the actual queue value into the message using variable {$chatQueueLength}.
Send Slack notification when an agent receives a negative rating
When an agent receives a negative rating for his ticket, you can define a rule that automatically notifies the manager about this negative rating. This can help you track all the negative ratings of your employees so that you can give them feedback and help improve the quality of your support team.
In this second example we use a different rule trigger: Apply when -> agent rated. The rule action used is send Slack message however instead of notifying a whole Slack channel we notify only a specific user. If you want to notify multiple specific users you can add this rule action multiple times into your rule using the Add action function at the bottom of your rule definition.
In the actual message that is being sent we use multiple parameters to pass the name of the agent that got the rating, name of the customer, and also the ID of the ticket so that you can easily find and check the content of that ticket in your LiveAgent account. The message can look for example like this:
{$last_in_ticket_agent_firstname} {$last_in_ticket_agent_lastname} was rebuked by {$initiator_firstname} {$initiator_lastname}. Check ticket: `<{$agentConversationUrl}|{$conv_code}>`
Send Slack notification when a tag is added to a ticket
This rule can have many different use cases. For example, if you want to receive a Slack notification about an urgent ticket that needs immediate attention you can create a tag in your LiveAgent called "Urgent". Then you will create a rule that will notify you whenever this tag is added to a ticket.
In our example below we use rule trigger ticket tags changed and in rule conditions we defined that it should trigger when the tag "Urgent" is added to the ticket and this ticket is in the "Billing" department. Rule action is send Slack message and it sends a custom message to a specific user in Slack.
In the actual message, we can send the ticket ID, date when the ticket was created, and the name of the agent that added the tag using available variables. The message can look for example like this:
Ticket *<{$agentConversationUrl}|{$conv_code}>* created on {$conv_datecreated} from {$initiator_firstname}{$initiator_lastname} under department {$conv_departmentName} was marked as *Urgent*
Channels visible to integration
By default the Slack integration can see all your public channels. If you wish to make a private channel visible to the integration as well you need to add the LiveAgent app to the channel.