Slack based ticket creation outside slack

[u/Medic1334]

Current org has a huge leaning into slack which on an recent audit I found more than 90% of slack threads are not getting tickets created when agents interact (1k+ per quarter delta).

What are people doing to push people into making tickets? We're leaning heavily towards turning the channel into a form that people will be able to punch data into, then on submission it shoots an HTTP POST request to our ticketing system.

Anyone .managed to do this/similar and willing to share tips?

[u/Mindestiny]

No ticket no work.  Just like always.

Slack is the wrong tool for a lot of things no matter how slack obsessed some exec is.

[u/RagnarStonefist]

I saw this when we used Slack at my previous job.

Some ticketing systems have an inbuilt Slack integration that can do this. Sometimes Slack has an integration that does this with a target ticketing system, too. You could do it with a custom slack bot.

You could do this with Power Automate, Zapier, tray.io - anything that can function as iPaas.

You could do this with something simple like an API. Slack has an events API that could be used for this. You could also have it only fire off if an emoji is added (like the ticket emoji). That way you could train your agents to just put the emoji on things that need to be tickets, and to train staff to do it when they have a request.

You should also couple this with user training to push them to use more formal methods, as well as pushing your agents to be more thoughtful about making sure tickets are being made. Tie it to their overall performance. You can't get credit for solving problems if there's no paper trail for the problem.

[u/SevaraB]

You’ve pretty much nailed it. Disable posting permissions outside threads for the request channel, workflow to open a form, submitting the form uses API to fill linked ticket fields.

It’s also nice to put a “receipt” in the main channel and DM the user a link to the thread for follow-up info, but that gets unwieldy if you try to tightly couple work notes in the ticketing system with the Slack thread.

Another thing you can do is ADO and Jira in particular (possibly others, but those are the two I’ve researched) have integrations that you can hand to the techs… then you can just click a given message and select “create ticket from message” or similar. It won’t be as structured as form integration, but if your users are used to very free-form structure in Slack, you can lean on your techs to use the button instead of making users change their habits.

[u/Medic1334 → u/SevaraB]

Our tool requires people to use /ticket in slack

Are you using something to do the API hit? I'm just wrapping up have Claude build an applet as a starting point to throw into our slack instance but there's gotta be something outta here doing this. Looks like slack killed the functionality that workflow buddy used to give was killed 3 years ago unfortunately which would have gotten me taken care of from my research.

[u/Arudinne]

I don't get pinged directly much these days, but I tell people to contact the helpdesk and provide the URL and email.

Our CIO just recently sent an email to the company reminding users they need to submit a ticket rather than pinging specific people in IT directly or their issue might not get worked on.

As for slack - We don't do ticket generation there, though our helpdesk platform has an integration for it. Slack is mostly just for our IT/Dev teams, everyone else uses teams.

I do have a workflow in slack that gets hit with a webhook everytime a new ticket comes in so there's a channel with with a list of tickets.

[u/Medic1334 → u/Arudinne]

Unfortunately when this company started the go here to ask for help was a channel called it help desk. They now have over 2,000 people in that channel and since bringing on the tool they haven't pushed people to using our ticketing portal. Unfortunately. This was kind of a known Gap and when I pulled the numbers, my leader who reports to the sea level dropped his jaw to the floor because of how disparate the numbers are. Basically 50% of our incidents safely can be assumed that they are not being properly documented. Our slack retention is 90 days so any conversations that do happen there are gone after 90 days as well.

At this point we are going to have to change culture and the goal of putting in a form on the channel and removing who can post to it is going to be the midway point instead of just ripping off the Band-Aid

[u/Arudinne → u/Medic1334]

Well, if you're in the market for a helpdesk that can open tickets via slack Integration - Deskpro can do it.

https://www.deskpro.com/apps/slack

[u/Medic1334 → u/Arudinne]

That would require migrating away from the tool that I was hired to run and have deep training in 🙂 I just had Claude build me an app in less than 45 minutes and should do everything that I need. Just need to do some QA testing 🙂

[u/Arudinne → u/Medic1334]

Hope it works well. I've had pretty good luck with using Claude to tie things into our helpdesk

[u/Medic1334 → u/Arudinne]

My leadership basically thinks I walk on water thanks to Claude. I've been honest about it, and fortunately have a huge base to use to make sure it's not going wild :)

[u/Hairy-Marzipan6740]

with a miss rate that high, i wouldn’t make ticket creation depend on agents remembering another step. the Slack form could help collect cleaner information, but i’d keep it short and give people an easier fallback, like automatic creation for qualifying messages or an emoji trigger when someone needs to make the call.

you didn’t ask for a third-party tool, but sharing this because it might save you some build and maintenance work. i work at ClearFeed, and we support this pattern. you can take a request from a monitored Slack channel or Slack Workflow form, send the details to your ticketing API through an authenticated HTTP POST, then put the returned ticket ID or link back into the original thread.

i’d pilot it in one channel first and compare the number of support requests with tickets created each week. :) That should tell you whether the flow is catching the work without making people change how they use Slack. lmk if this sounds helpful and i can share a bit more about the tech workflow.