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How to answer support tickets from Slack
Work the support queue from Slack: Cedric reads Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk or Help Scout, drafts the reply from the ticket, and sends only on your yes.
Benjamin Ben HattarMost support leads spend the day in Slack. The helpdesk lives in another tab. So the day turns into a loop. A ping lands in #support, you switch tabs, find the ticket, scroll the history, check what plan the customer is on, write the reply, switch back and tell the team it is handled.
Each lap takes a few minutes. Almost none of it is the answer itself. It is finding things.
This post is not about putting a chatbot in front of your customers. Helpdesks like Intercom ship their own, and a bot earns its keep on the easy questions. The tickets that reach a person are the ones a bot could not close, and that person's time goes into the loop above. The fix here is for the person working the queue. Pull the lookup and the first draft into Slack, and keep every customer-facing reply under a human yes.
- Customers keep talking to people. What moves into Slack is the searching, the reading and the first draft.
- Connect Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk or Help Scout to Cedric and ask for the queue in plain words.
- He reads the ticket's history, internal notes included, and drafts the public reply or a private note.
- Replies to customers, closing tickets and bulk changes wait for a yes in the thread.
- Your helpdesk's own triggers, macros and workflows keep running. Cedric works on top of them.
The oldest ticket
Found, read, drafted, and held for a yes.
Rafael Mendes9:14 AM
@Cedric what's the oldest open ticket in Zendesk, and draft the answer.
CedricAPP9:15 AM
#5102 from Kestrel Labs, open 3 days, unassigned: "CSV import drops rows over 10,000". Lena left an internal note on Monday with the workaround, which is to split the file. The help center article "Importing large files" covers it. Draft public reply: the limit, the workaround step by step, the article linked, and a line that we will write back when the limit changes. Proposed alongside: assign to you, tag import-limit, set to pending.
Set it up
- 01
Add Cedric to Slack
Install him in your workspace and invite him to #support. Anyone in the channel can mention him. You start with 100,000 free credits, about $50 of work, and no card.
- 02
Connect the helpdesk
From the dashboard, connect Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk or Help Scout on the helpdesk's own sign-in screen.
These are catalog connections, not built-in playbooks. Cedric works from what the connection can read and do, and says so when something is out of reach.
- 03
Ask for the queue
"Which tickets are urgent and unassigned?" "What has waited longest in the Sales mailbox?" "What's still open for Brightwater Dental?" He answers in the channel with ticket numbers, ages and owners.
- 04
Answer one
"Draft the reply to #5102." He reads the whole ticket first, public replies and internal notes, and writes from what was already said, so the customer does not get asked the same question twice.
- 05
Approve in the thread
Send it, edit it, or hold it. The reply goes out only when someone says yes, along with any status, tag or assignee change he proposed.
What each helpdesk connection covers
The four connections share a shape: find, read, draft, update, every customer-facing write on your yes. The details differ, and they are worth knowing before you ask.
Zendesk. Tickets by keyword, status, requester, assignee, tag or date, with the full conversation and internal notes. He drafts a public reply or a private comment, searches the help center for the article to link, and updates status, priority, type, assignee, group, tags and custom fields. Queue summaries and satisfaction ratings are there for the weekly report.
Intercom. He looks up a contact by email or name, their company and the conversation history with who handled each one. He drafts a reply, an internal note or a new outbound message, then assigns, snoozes, closes or tags. Workspace billing and account settings are outside the connection.
Freshdesk. Tickets by status, priority, requester, tag or date. He replies or adds a private note, assigns to an agent or a group, logs time entries, and merges a contact who wrote in twice. Hourly request limits depend on your Freshdesk plan.
Help Scout. Conversations across mailboxes by status, tag, assignee or date, with internal notes. He drafts replies and private notes, assigns an owner, moves mailboxes and tags. Reports on volume, response times and happiness ratings come back for the period you name.
The same job, two places
| Job | In the helpdesk tab | From Slack with Cedric |
|---|---|---|
| Find what is urgent | Build or open a saved view | "Which tickets are urgent and unassigned?" |
| Read the history | Open the ticket and scroll | Summarized in the thread, notes included |
| Find the help article | Search the help center | Linked in the draft, in Zendesk and Intercom |
| Write the reply | From scratch or a macro | Drafted from the ticket, sent on your yes |
| Route it | Change the fields by hand | Assignee, tags and status proposed with the reply |
| The weekly numbers | Export a report | Pulled for the period, in Zendesk, Freshdesk and Help Scout |
Who approves
Anyone in the channel where the request appears can approve it. That is a feature when #support is the support team, and a problem when #support has two hundred people in it. Keep ticket work in a channel whose members should be sending replies to customers. How approvals work covers the rest, including why there is no switch that lets him send on his own.
What still needs a person
Every reply to a customer. He proposes the text, you send it. That holds for the hundredth ticket as much as the first.
The judgment calls. A refund outside policy, an exception for a long-time account, telling a customer no. He can pull the history and draft the words. The decision is yours.
Large pulls take a moment. Each helpdesk enforces its own request limits, so a very large search comes back in pages, not all at once.
FAQ
No. In this setup customers never talk to Cedric. He works for the support team in Slack, and every reply to a customer goes out only after a person approves it.
No. Your triggers, macros, automations and workflows keep running. Cedric reads, drafts and updates on top of them, the way an agent with the same permissions would.
Yes. In Zendesk, Intercom and Help Scout he reads the full history, internal notes included, and can add a private note of his own. A private note stays private; a public reply is proposed first.
Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk and Help Scout each have a page under integrations. All four come from Cedric's catalog of 3,200+ apps, connected once from the dashboard.
Anyone in the channel where Cedric asks. Control who approves by controlling who is in the channel.
Free to start, no card.