Slack Live Chat Integration

With our Slack Live Chat integration you can answer live chats right from your Slack account on your mobile or desktop apps. You'll receive push notifications on your phone for each live chat request and can chat from within Slack.

Visit our app in the  Slack App market

New Live Chat Users

If you don't have a Social Intents account yet but do have a Slack account begin by logging into your Slack account and creating a new public channel dedicated to your live chat incoming requests:

Next, Add Live Chat to your Slack Account from our Live Chat install page under Live Chat on our main site.   Go to our Slack Live Chat Page and click the Add to Slack button.You'll be asked to login:

Then you'll be directed to an Authorize Page where you will pick the live chat channel you just created and select the permissions to allow by default.  Please leave these as the defaults or you may not receive new live chats properly:

Finally, you'll be directed back to our site where you new account account has been set up.

All of your team members who have visibility to the channel will be able to receive chat requests.

Once a chat is received you can simply click on the link in the request to open a dedicated channel to that specific chat.

All chats are archived after 12 hours so they don't clutter the left-hand side of Slack.

Existing Social Intents Users

You can add our Slack integration to your existing Live Chat app.  If you are typically on your mobile phone, this is a great way to live chat on your phone using the Slack client.

In Social Intents, click on the Integrations link on the left-hand side and you'll see an Add to Slack button.

Click on this and you'll be directed to the Slack Authorization page (login to Slack or set up a new account if needed).

Accept the default privileges and choose a public channel for the Post to section.  Please note, if you select a private channel, or change a private to public channel, you may not receive chat requests correctly.  We suggest to always create a new public channel to start with.

If you have to use a private channel, please be sure to invite our chat bot to that channel so we can send messages to it.

Do this by selecting the channel and clicking Invite Others to this Channel.   Then select the Live Chat bot:

That's it!  Click on Preview of the Live Chat app and start a new chat.  You should see the live chat show up in Slack.

Answering Chats in Slack

All new chats will be directed to the public chat channel you initially configured.

They will look like this:

To Answer the chat, click on the link starting with # - in the above case: #z-lc-testing-only.  You'll be directed to a temporary channel created for this specific chat.

Click "Join Chat" and enter a message to begin the chat.

Agent Photos

We support displaying your Slack photo right in the live chat by default.  To enable or disable this feature, simply go to the Integrations page and choose to enable or disable this option.

Here's an example where the Slack Profile photo is used.

Chat Availability: Online and Offline From Slack

With our Slack integration we suggest you use the live chat schedule on our website to manage whether your chat widget is online or offline at any time.  

We also support manually setting the chat to online and offline right from Slack using slash commands.  You simply type a slash and your live chat command into the message area of slack to do this:   /livechat offline or /livechat online to set these right from Slack without visiting our site!  See our other slash commands below.

Slack Slash Commands

We offer a number of commands right from our Slack app.  Just type this command in the message area (at the start of a message) to execute them.

  • /livechat help - to see a list of commands available
  • /livechat end - to close a specific live chat.  Execute this from within your specific live chat channel
  • /livechat online - change your live chat app to online.  Overrides office hours.
  • /livechat offline - change your live chat to offline. Overrides office hours.
  • /livechat <your shortcut name> - sends your canned message to the client chat.

Slack Shortcuts and Canned Messages

Set up shortcuts for common questions in your Social Intents account.  You can then trigger these right from Slack using your Slash Commands.  Each shortcut is available as a slash command using this format:

/livechat <your shortcut name>