Atlas

Atlas Help Center

Stay updated on the status of all your company's support tickets.

Customer portal

Slack Connect integration allows you to manage customer support directly through Slack, creating a seamless communication channel between your team and customers.

Click the "Setup" or "Connect to Slack" button. Complete the OAuth flow to authorize Atlas to connect to your Slack workspace. You'll be directed to the Slack configuration screen.

Enabling Slack Connect as a support channel

This feature allows you to create tickets from Slack messages. In Slack, click on a customer message or react with the ticket emoji. A ticket will be created inside the Slack thread. The ticket appears in your Atlas inbox with a Slack icon, indicating its origin.

Turn on Slack Connect as a support channel.

Allow customers to create tickets by reacting with the ticket emoji.

Display ticket status to customers with a check emoji when completed.

This setting applies these Slack Connect features to the selected channels in batch.

Slack tickets are marked with the Slack icon.

Hover over messages to see where it was sent, who sent it, and the sender's Slack handle.

Click the link to view the original Slack thread.

Both customer and agent messages appear in the timeline.

The composer for Slack tickets features a rich text editor with standard Slack-supported blocks and full Slack formatting capabilities. Simply select the preferred channel as ‘Slack’ in the composer to get started.

Can I use Slack Connect as a channel in multiple Slack workspaces?

Currently, Atlas supports connection to one Slack workspace at a time.

Can a customer or teammate accidentally create a ticket? 

If a customer reacts with a ticket emoji but the feature isn't enabled, no ticket will be created. Only authorized team members can create tickets if this feature is disabled.

Can I customize the emojis that are used?

The ticket and check emojis are set by default and cannot be changed at this time.

Configuring Slack Connect

Using Slack to talk to your customers can be a secret weapon. If you’re a B2B business, your customers are likely already using Slack, so it’s easy for them, which means you’ll get more frequent questions and feedback. It’s also less formal so they’ll ask smaller questions. All of this means that you’ll usually have better communication with customers through Slack than any other channel. However, it also means things can get a little messy.

This article will walk you through how to clean up your Slack Connect channels and set expectations so that you can maintain the benefits of using Slack while also keeping your house in order related to support.

There are two things you should do when you start using ticketing with Slack Connect:

coordinate how you will manage tickets with your team

Let your customers know that you’re going to start tracking their requests so you can respond faster and make sure you don’t lose any of their tickets.

When you create a ticket, they’ll see a 🎫 emoji on the message a message like this in the thread:

Ask them to respond in the same thread to reply to that ticket .

Make sure your team knows how to create, manage, and coordinate on tickets in Slack Connect channels. Below are some of the items you should discuss with them.

 first agent to respond self-assigns, escalates as needed

For smaller teams (eg, 5 or fewer agents), we’d recommend option 1 so that you can make sure someone on your team is giving a response even when an agent is out of office, in a call, etc.

In both cases, agents should respond to customers with direct answers when they can and 

 if the answer requires additional work, for instance:

performing a manual task (eg, changing the customer’s plan or something on their account), or

an outside team’s involvement (eg, fixing a bug or building a feature)

When creating a ticket, it’s important to set the priority of the ticket so that anyone viewing the ticket in the future (including yourself) knows whether to address it before another ticket and has a relative timeframe in which it needs to be solved.

We recommend using the following scale for priorities:

High: should be solved within a day (4-24 hrs)

Medium: should be solved within a week (1-5 days)

Low: should be solved within a month (1-4 wks)

When a ticket requires outside help or discussion among your team, it’s important to keep the conversation related to it centralized within the ticket for better documentation and for getting team members up to speed.

Atlas web app: set the composer to “Internal note” and write messages here, mentioning teammates as needed.

Slack triage channel: respond in the ticket thread in the channel you’ve designated as your support triage channel. All of these messages (unless prepended with “@Atlas” will be saved as internal notes).

The default when creating a ticket should be to assign yourself, unless you know another teammate is better equipped. In this case, it’s useful to also @mention your teammate within an internal note as well.

After you’ve responded to a ticket and assigned it to a teammate (or yourself), the next step is tagging the ticket. This helps you understand and categorize your tickets much more easily in the future so that you can understand how to best improve your product and support practices.

Customers usually expect fairly quick response times in Slack (on the order of hours). It’s best to make sure multiple of your teammates have been invited to your customer Slack Connect channels so that you can do this.

In addition, if a message has been converted to a ticket, you can set response time reminders using

 so that the person responsible for the ticket and/or a manager is notified in Slack when the response time has been too long.

creating tickets for your engineering team

When a customer runs into a bug, it’s time to get your engineering team involved. In this situation, you should link your ticket to a new or existing Linear or Jira issue. Once you’ve clarified the problem with your engineering team, ask them for a timeline and let your customer know so that they know what to expect for a turnaround. Then, snooze the ticket until that time has come. If the bug is fixed sooner, then the ticket will automatically be moved back to Open and you’ll be notified. Otherwise, it’s a good idea to remind your engineering team and get a new timeline for your customer.

Best Practices

Chat, email, SMS, and other channels for talking to your customers