📲 Sending notifications to Slack from Stylo Score updates in Zendesk Support.

You can use Stylo Scores, along with the free Zendesk/Slack integration, to notify Slack channels of customers that come in angry or have become more angry throughout the ticket life. This is a super easy integration that can make a huge impact on your business in many different ways. Some examples: 

1. You might want to have a private leadership channel (with some people not even having access to Zendesk) get notified every time a very angry customer sends you a ticket, or if the frustration level of a ticket increases by 5 or more points - which indicates a real problem with communication breakdown. 

2. Maybe you want to notify your entire support team when there is a high frustration change on a ticket as a way to catch a problem before it turns into a nightmare - like a ticket assigned to someone that's not even here...sitting on a beach somewhere enjoying a mai tai on vacation. Oopsie. 

3. Maybe your customer success or account management team would like to be notified in a channel whenever customers come in hot, get angrier, or when they are particularly happy about a particular issue, feature, team, person, or the whole org. You can send an immediate message to that channel with all of the details on the ticket - even if they aren't agents in Zendesk. 

4. Let's not forget to celebrate the GREAT things that happen :) Let's send a message to a channel to yell from a mountaintop every time we have a Delight/Delight Change increase of 5 or more points, which displays the assignee's name and shows the latest happy comment from the customer. Seeing more and more of these messages makes it pretty clear to the whole organization that we're doing a great job of making our customers happy!

There are a few different ways you can get information out of Zendesk and into Slack. The ideal solution we've found is to actually use the free Zendesk/Slack integration, found in the marketplace here. If you are very much against installing this integration for some reason (no judgments here - to each their own), you can get a similar result if you use an integration tool like Zapier, Workato, or you can even create a Zendesk Target to send an email that Slack can ingest and produce a specific notification. Send a message to our team or setup some time to talk if you'd like help with setting up via a different route than the Zendesk/Slack integration. 

How it works: 
1. Go to the Zendesk app marketplace and install the Slack integration
2. Once you have the slack app installed in Zendesk, as well as the Zendesk app installed in your Slack, you're going to see the app in your list of Apps in slack: 

3. Now that you have the Zendesk app installed in slack, you can invite the app into whatever channel you want to use for notifications. To invite the app into that channel, just go to that channel and type @zendesk and hit enter. It will ask you if you want to invite the bot to the channel. Click yes to invite. 

4. OK. Now that we've gotten our Slack account ready to accept messages into the channel that we're going to send to, we need to go to Zendesk to create a trigger to send a message based on Stylo Scores. To do that, we'll go to Zendesk, open up the Admin Center (gear on the left, then click Go To Admin Center) and then search for Triggers. From here, we'll create a new trigger: 

5. Pick what Stylo fields you want to use, which will determine the behavior that triggers the notification; such as Stylo Frustration, or Stylo Frustration Change, or maybe you want to make a special notification from Stylo Urgency or Delight fields. Not sure what these all mean? Check out our Scores Dictionary. Once you know what you are going to trigger from, you can setup your trigger something like this: 

You'll want to make sure that you consider a couple of things;

A. You likely only want this message to fire one time. To ensure this on mine, I'm adding a special tag in the actions (make it the first action) called slackfrustratednotify. I'm then looking for that tag in my Meet All conditions, specifically limiting it out if it finds it. That means it adds the tag every time it fires, and then prevents it from firing again if that tag is added to the ticket. 
B. You'll want to limit in/out all of the values in the particular field you're using. For this one we're firing the trigger ONLY if the frustration change is 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 or 9 (in the meet any conditions) and we're specifically limiting OUT any that are 0,1,2,3,4 by putting 'is not' in the meet all conditions. We've also limited this down a bit to only tickets less than solved, and only tickets that are updated (we don't want this to fire on ticket creation, in this case - though you might for other use cases). 

Notice that in our actions we're selecting the Slack integration, and we're specifically selecting the channel that this notifies. If you wanted to notify multiple channels, or if you wanted to make slightly different notifications for different channels (maybe it's 5+ in this channel but 7+ in a leadership channel), you could simply clone this trigger and make some slight changes to each, without having to re-create it from scratch each time. 

In the slack message 'notification body' itself, note how we also added our Stylo custom fields so that it shows what the frustration level is, as well as the frustration change score in the message that will be shown in slack. This is done with a custom field place holder, which has the format {{ticket.ticket_field_123456}, where 123456 is the Field ID. You can find your own unique custom field IDs when you pull up that field in your admin settings: 

6. Now that you've gotten the trigger setup you should start to see notifications that come through that Slack channel each time a ticket is updated and meets the conditions you have set (and if you've set it up correctly, it should not repeat itself). For this particular trigger, the Slack notification looks like this: 

One of the big benefits of using the Zendesk/Slack integration for this is the formatting. It makes the message look very clean and compact, yet still hyperlinks directly to the ticket, shows the ticket number, status, time stamp, etc. You can add all sorts of customized variables to this message including the customer Organization (company), custom fields, org fields...whatever info you have in Zendesk and want to display here can be displayed. 

Lost? Confused? Looking for a laugh? Reach out to us or schedule a call with our team and we'll be happy to walk you through it.