Getting Started with Alerts

What is an alert?

Customer communication on Slack can be challenging. Often, your teams struggle with keeping track of conversations.

Alerts are smart messages you can schedule or trigger based on important events. Alerts can be configured to reach you in Slack(Thena App Messages, or a specific channel). Use Alerts to stay organised, save time and automate away repetitive tasks / follow ups.

Here are some examples of how Alerts helps you in your day to day customer communication:

E.g. 1: Customer sends a message but you forgot to respond.
The First Response SLA alert will notify you of a pending customer response.

E.g. 2: Customer asked you a question, but you didn't notice
The alert for a request detected will be sent to you on the channel of your choice.

Types of Alerts

Request Detected

To cater to Customer Requests, the Request alert feature was introduced.

Essentially, whenever a customer request is detected, an alert will be sent on a channel of your choice. This will ensure that you never miss a customer message.

The simplified automated workflow is as follows:

• When the customer has sent a message, our Machine Learning will check the message for a Customer Request?
• Identify whether the vendor (you) has asked to be alerted. If setup, send the alert with the request to the relevant channel.

We allow users to Create a ticket, Assign it to others/themselves, or mark the request as closed.

Next Steps after getting the alert

The user can create a ticket that will send the relevant request to a third party integration like Freshdesk/Intercom/Zendesk. Also, the user can use 'Looking into it' to assign the request to themselves.

If the request needs one of your peers to look at it, use 'Assign to someone' feature. This will allow you to let a peer know that they are needed on this customer request. They will be notified of the assignment through a Direct Message.

Lastly, if the user feels that the request does not need any further action, they can close the request.

This will then be highlighted in the 'My Summary' section. To see all requests assigned to you, simply type /my summary and press enter.

First Response SLA

Our customers wanted the ability to be alerted whenever there was a message from a Customer that was not replied to within a pre-configured time duration (SLA).

Now, you can create an alert, that will be sent to a channel of your choice, whenever you have missed responding to a Customer message. We support an SLA from 0.5 hrs up to 48 hrs.

Here is what a sample alert looks like within the #internal-thena-customers channel.

Setting it Up
At an installation level, set it up in the Settings section of our webapp

At a channel level: Go to the Accounts section of our webapp -> Configure tab -> SLA section.

Ticket Closure SLA (Coming Soon)

Often, the transparency into which Requests have been open for a while, and breached the SLA standards set by your organisation (or per customer) is lacking. Now, you can create an alert, that will be sent to a channel of your choice, whenever a Customer Request has Breached SLA for resolution time.

To express interest, please upvote the feature here.

Things to keep in mind

• Slack will unfurl the message information only for public channels. If a suggested request has been detected on a private channel, Slack will not unfurl it to cater to permissions.