Slack Integration Set Up

Enhance your live chat experience by integrating Slack with our platform. Whether you're a dedicated Slack user or you typically rely on your mobile phone for chat notifications, our Slack Integration set up allows you to manage live chats directly from the Slack app and instantly receive mobile notifications of new website chat requests, keeping you connected to your website visitors anytime, anywhere.

Here's a quick overview video of the installation process for Slack:

How To: Adding the Slack Integration to your Live Chat

If you already have a Social Intents account, you can add the Slack Integration by clicking on the Integrations link once logged in.  Then select the Connect button under the Slack logo.  Otherwise, register for your 14-Day Free Trial.

This will take you to the Slack integration page.  Click on the Add to Slack button 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 by mentioning @LiveChat in a message in your channel.

You can also add the @LiveChat bot 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 Slack 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.

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>

Example Chat in Slack

Here's a video example of how to answer a website live chat in Slack once you've embedded the chat widget on your website.  This is how the conversation should flow once you complete the set up steps above.