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Slack Integration

How can I set up Slack notifications for my contacts?

Rain Hyneman avatar
Written by Rain Hyneman
Updated over 11 months ago

Our Slack integration can notify your Contacts that their visitors (or deliveries) have arrived right through their Slack instance! If you've enabled two-way chat and created Quick Replies, the replies will appear as buttons in the Slack notification and can be clicked to expedite replying to visitors.

Getting Started

Because this integration will use the email address that is entered into our system to connect with the users in your Slack workspace, you will first want to ensure each contact has an email address that matches their Slack email address. You can verify this by checking the email address associated with each contact on the Contacts page.

Adding the Integration

An Account Owner will need to navigate to the Integrations page and click the "Add" button:

An image of The Receptionist's integration page. The "Slack" option has been highlighted.

Authorizing the Integration

They will then be taken to Slack's consent page. (For our server to connect to your Slack workspace, an administrator of your Slack workspace may need to sign in and click the Allow button.)

An image of a step in the Slack integration set-up process that shows a user selecting the "Allow" button to allow The Receptionist to access a Slack workspace.

Slack Usernames

The Receptionist needs to know what Slack username is associated with each of your contacts to send notifications. Populating this attribute can happen in three different ways: manually adding the attribute, Contact import, or turning on the "sync" function of the integration.

1. Manually Adding: navigate to the Contacts area, edit one of your contacts, and fill in the Slack Username field. Slack Usernames can be found by opening a channel in Slack and doing an "@ mention" for the person. The text that appears after the "@" is their username. You can also visit Slack's "Manage Users" area to find their username.

A screenshot of a Slack User. Their Slack Username is highlighted.

2. CSV Import: you can add a "Slack" column to a CSV file of contacts that includes the usernames.

3. Slack Sync: only an option if the Contact email address matches the email they use in Slack, as the sync will look up Slack users using email. If a Slack user is found, the username associated with that user will be automatically added to the contact's record.

Slack Message Rules

Once a Contact has a Slack attribute, the messaging rules will show Slack options, just like our SMS and email notifications. An "immediate" message preference will automatically be added to any contact when the Slack Username has been added.

An image of a Contact's messaging rules. A Slack messaging rule has been added.

Notifications for new visitors will now come through the SlackBot channel and allow your contacts and visitors to proceed with two-way communications.

Channel Messages

Want to send notifications to an entire Slack channel instead of a single person? You can! To set this up, you will add the channel's full name (including the "#" sign) to the Slack Username field of a Contact.

An image of the customization screen for a Contact. In the box for "Slack Usernames," the name of a Slack channel has been posted (in this case, #general).

Notifications sent to a channel are prepended with "@here" so that they notify everyone present in a channel. This functionality is great for delivery buttons, for example, when you want several people to know that a delivery is waiting.

Have questions or need assistance? Try clicking on the orange chat bubble in the lower right corner to livechat with a member of the team!

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