According to Enlyft, there are around 135,711 companies that currently use slack as collaborative software. 

Chances are, your business might be one of those 135,711 companies. Though using slack as a means of communication between members of the same team or different teams in a company leads to productive work culture, companies can leverage the instant messaging platform even more. How, you ask? By turning slack into your business’ employee support hub. Here’s why. 

Slack is a modern workplace communication or chat tool that helps users connect and collaborate quickly. It also serves as a platform for users to interact with 3rd party apps, which makes it easy for all teams to get work done quickly.

With slack being one of the most widely used communication hub, having a chatbot on slack makes it easy for companies to automate user interactions and workflows that help offer several benefits. Companies are starting to adopt bots on slack that can help automate IT Helpdesk and HR support but also see increased adoption in other parts of the business such as finance, and facilities.

Today, several conversational ai no-code platforms offer quick and efficient way for companies to build bots (for different use cases) and deploy them on slack thus making a slack chatbot more appealing as it does not require human intervention and can autonomously support users.

And it doesn't stop there, you can also automate app workflows from your slack chatbot using no-code platforms. And what this means is, slack Chabot can automate both conversations and interact with apps to automate workflows as well that makes it very attractive to deliver customer and employee service automation.

1. Helps you get more out of your existing software

Be it Jira Cloud for getting notifications about issues as and when they get mentioned, or HubSpot for your sales and marketing efforts, or Freshservice for managing your IT services, you can add the slack version of the apps your business already uses in the channel of your choice from the slack app directory. 

This makes it easier for your employees to use slack’s version of IT service management apps like Freshservice for 

• Converting slack direct message (DM) conversations to tickets in Freshservice

• Adding slack conversation as ticket description for context

• Getting in touch with the Subject Matter Expert (SME) of an IT issue right away via slack DMs.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

2. It’s super-flexible

With slack, you can create separate channels for different teams or, you can create a shared channel for your organization and a third-party vendor to collaborate. Channels are a great way of letting employees stay in the loop of things. Be it support agents getting notified in slack about tickets raised via DM or a channel, or an agent reacting to an issue raised by a requestor in a channel to let them know about its status, slack helps in streamlining IT processes. 

Moreover, your company’s help desk agents will be able to guide an employee with their issue via slack’s audio and video calls feature on-the-go. Pretty Neat, huh? 

3. Prevents Silos among Teams 

According to this infographic by the Queens University of Charlotte, 49% of Millennials (who are soon to comprise the majority of the workforce) support social tools for workplace collaboration.  

In fact, about 40% of Millennials would even pay out of pocket for social collaboration tools to improve productivity. That’s how much they believe in the dream team of collaboration and technology. 

Slack, through its plethora of real-time collaboration and document authoring tools like Google Drive, Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive makes the dream team of collaboration and technology all the more, real. Through pinned messages and files, new joiners or people already in your team’s Slack channel will be able to review things such as: 

• Product spec 

• Tech spec 

• Designs 

This way, lots of onboarding meetings and a slew of forwarded email threads to root through for new employees can be avoided.

Team members will also be able to scan through all previous conversations, decisions and the people involved in the channel. This kind of transparency ultimately leads to the reduction of help desk tickets raised by employees. Now that’s more like it. 

4. Easier for triaging issues 

Let’s say you have a slack channel called #support for employees to report their IT issues.   Whenever an employee reports their issue in the #support channel, the employee or the help desk manager can call the attention of another member who might be an SME for that issue by including an @mention. The person mentioned will then be notified immediately.  

As seen in the above example, the @mention comes in handy when the help desk manager wants to triage issues mentioned in the channel to the corresponding SME. The SME can then update the status of the issue in the channel itself with the help of emojis that’s easier to track for the employee who reported the issue as well as for the help desk manager. 

But with limitations.

There are lot of benefits of using slack in your company. And although it is beneficial for companies to use slack, it comes with several limitations especially if you want to automate user interactions and workflows for IT helpdesk or workplace support. Thankfully, you can overcome these limitations by having a slack chatbot that can do much more than just notifications or converting DM to tickets.

Think of workativ assistant like an icing on the cake to all that you can already do with slack at workplace. With workativ assistant, you can build a conversational bot that sounds humane and solves your employees’ issues with the power of both NLP and workflow automation in the snap of a finger.

Yeah, you heard it right. But Thanos’ snap can only turn half of the universe’s population to dust, while a bot can turn most of not all of your employees’ IT woes into dust in no time. Let’s see what makes workativ assistant’s bot so worthy of wielding the infinity gauntlet more than Thanos. 

Here is a short video of how to use a no-code platform like workativ assistant to build your slack chatbot.

Click here to see the video

Slack chatbot can be very useful for companies to automate IT Helpdesk operations. Having an effective slack bot as your first line agent can really benefit companies to automate repetitive issues, decrease mean time to respond, improve employee experience and reduce costs.

Let's look at top 6 issues that slack bot can automate for IT Helpdesk.

1. Unlocking Accounts

Problem:

Your account has been locked unexpectedly and you want to get it unlocked quickly! This is one of the most frequent queries that hit the help desk. It is repetitive and has a defined process. A perfect candidate for your slack bot.

Solution:

In this case, the user types in something like Unlock My Account or select Unlock Account from a list of options provided by the Slack chatbot. The bot understands the query and asks for some user details to verify, and unlocks the account in seconds.

2. Resetting Passwords

Problem:

Password Reset is the most common request in the IT helpdesk. An agent may take longer than a chatbot to resolve such a trivial issue. With the self-service slack chatbot, you can go through the transparent resolution process yourself and get your password reset in seconds.

Solution:

The user has to simply type in Reset Password into their Slack window. The Bot understands and asks the user for some details like email address for verification. Then, it either sends a password reset link to the user’s email address or asks the user to key-in the new password and resets it.

3. User Provisioning

Problem:

When a new user joins a company or moves to a different department, your IT and HR teams works with the process and systems to create new year, assigns email, adds role and user access privileges to various applications and so on depending on company policy. This takes time.

Solution:

Let the Slack chatbot do that for you in seconds!

All you need to do is type in their query or request (say, create an account for Aaron Smith) in the Slack chat box. The bot looks for key words in the user’s input and responds with either more options to clarify the issue or asks for specific user details for verification. Once verified, it proceeds with the provisioning or deprovisioning process as requested.

4. Access Requests

Problem:

Another candidate for automation is access requests when users change roles or needs access to app. The process and efforts are time consuming with traditional IT Helpdesk.

Solution:

Slack bot can handle this easily. A user types in the query (say I am not able to access the HR portal) and the chatbot asks for the email address for verification and verifies if the user has access before. Post validation, the bot either raises a request to the management for providing access to the user or allows access to the particular resource (here HR portal) itself. Takes only a few seconds.

5. Asset Request

Problem:

Companies provide workplace assets for employees. And when the asset breaks or needs new or additional assets like laptop or keypad, employees raise new asset requests with IT Helpdesk. This is a defined process that can be automated fairly quickly.

Solution:

With slack bot, user types in the query (say My laptop is not working) and the bot asks for more detailed description of the issue. When the user elaborates the issue, the bot proceeds with a request to the management for issuing a new laptop, creates an IT ticket and shares it details with the user as well.

6. Suspend a User

Problem:

Suspending users refers to revoking a user’s access to a particular service and removing them from the company’s email list. Businesses come across similar situations quite often. You wonder if that can be done in seconds?

Solution:

With slack bot, user needs to do is type “Suspend < user’s name >” and the bot, after validating and getting required approval, will either suspend the user itself or raise a raise a ticket for second level agent to suspend the user. `

Because it's easy. Here are some reasons on why you should choose a no-code platform to build you slack bot. We have used workativ assistant as an example.

1. One-click slack integration 

Deploying a bot in your preferred slack workspace’s channel is as easy as pie. Just click on the add to slack button, grant the permissions required by workativ assistant to access your slack workspace, add the bot to the channel of your choice, and you’re good to go. 

2. Automates repetitive IT issues with workflows and not just conversations

According to INRY, password resets constitute an astonishing 20% to 50% of help desk calls. And like you’d already know; password resets aren’t that much of an issue to call another person for a solution when we ourselves can solve it. 

By automating repetitive, mundane tasks like a password reset, unlocking an account, etc., the average cost-per-call to your internal help desk gets reduced drastically.  And workativ assistant makes it possible using its workflow automation feature to integrate your bot with several IAM apps and create workflow or an automation in just a few clicks of a button for resetting a password. No coding knowledge required.

Handy, right? 

3. Manage several simple or complex use-cases with chatbot builder

Yes, you can create automations like a breeze using workativ assistant. But what use are those automations when you don’t deliver the solution properly? 

This is where workativ assistant’s intuitive chatbot builder comes into play. With chatbot builder’s myriad of options, you can create conversations for any number of scenarios with a human touch more so that people who chat with the bot can’t tell the difference between chatting with a human and a bot. Again, no coding knowledge required. 

4. App integrations and workflow marketplace 

You can connect your bot with your business’ apps and use pre-built app workflows for your chatbot

Be it sending an OTP via Twilio, creating a ticket via Freshservice, or sending a message to a slack channel, workativ assistant can do this and more for you once you connect it to the required app. 

And you don’t even have to create Automations from scratch. Through the workativ assistant workflow marketplace, you can add ready-made automations for the required apps with just the click of a button. 

5. Trains itself to better understand your employees 

Workativ assistant’s training module enables the bot that you create to learn from its historical data of conversations with your employees and train itself to better detect an employees’ intention for initiating a conversation. 

Now that you know why using slack as an internal help desk can help transform your workplace support, why not combine it with workativ assistant to let your employees get the best out of your internal IT support?  

Think about it. With slack’s superior features and workativ assistant’s conversational ai-powered automations, you can do so much more for your employees. 

1. Supercharge self-service for your employees 

By deploying a bot built using workativ assistant in the slack channel for reporting IT issues, your employees can solve their problems themselves from the comfort of the channel.

2. 24×7 availability  

Help desk agents can’t be available 24×7 to help out employees with their issues. After all, they’re human too. They need ample rest just like the rest of us. 

To “help” your help desk agents, you can build a bot that offers IT support for repetitive tasks like a password reset, unlocking an account, etc., (as discussed earlier) in your workplace support slack channel as well as train itself to resolve problems based on solutions previously offered for similar problems by a help desk agent. This allows employees to solve their problems quickly as and when they arise without the hassles of long waiting queues. 

3. Call deflection 

Enabling employees to resolve their IT issues themselves via bot in your workplace support slack channel prevents the bottleneck of a single help desk agent handling huge number of calls.  Providing self-serve to employees via bot also thwarts the need for help desk agents to provide in-person support. 

4. All-encompassing 

Adding the slack version of your business’ apps from the slack app directory every time can be a bit frustrating.  

With workativ assistant, you can connect your business’ apps with bot and automate tasks for those apps instead of adding them from the Slack App Directory. This makes it easier on your IT Admins as well as your employees. Be it creating a ticket in Zendesk or sending an email via Outlook, your employees can use the bot to take care of it.  

5. Productive and satisfied employees 

Enabling your employees to solve their IT issues themselves in a slack channel via bot leads them to solve their issues then and there itself and continue with their work.  

For employees, this eliminates the frustration that comes with the labyrinthine way of getting an IT issue resolved like sending multiple emails, redirects to different SMEs, etc., Employee self-service also let's help desk agents focus on resolving the more pressing IT issues at hand. 

6. Cost savings

With bot deployed in a slack channel, you can get rid of the overheads that come with repetitive tickets and truly see your help desk costs take a dive immediately. Building and using a slack bot with workativ starts at $299 per month flat. Compare that with hiring a live agent. The cost savings are 10x. More on pricing here.

Deploying your bot on slack is easy. It is just an easy set of steps to follow and you will be done with having a bot on slack in no time. Let us see some of the major steps involved in the process. 

Once you have built your bot, and ready to deploy on slack, you can login to your workativ assistant workspace.

• Select Slack as the desired Chat Channel

• Click Add to Slack to start a new integration

• Sign in to your Slack workspace on the URL: https://api.slack.com

• Create a new app for the Workativ Assistant chatbot and select the desired App Name (Bot name)

• Customize your bot by selecting its Logo, Background Colour, and Bot Name

• Update the required information in both Slack App page and Workativ’s Slack Integration page

• Save the changes and click Add to Slack

There you go! You have successfully deployed your chatbot on slack and you can easily access it by signing into your slack workspace.

Since you have reached the conclusion, you must be clear by now that Slack is one of the best enterprise level communication tools for the interaction between the chatbot and the users. It is found that 70% of users prefer using slack for reporting their support issues. And while it's great for people to interact, using slack chatbot can really transform workplace support by automating both interactions and as well workflows.

In a nutshell, it is evident that companies are ought to select slack as the suitable platform for deploying their chatbots. With the AI powered no-code platforms like workativ assistant, you can leap your slack bot journey. Bringing together Workativ Assistant, Slack and other third-party tools makes your BOT no less than a SUPER-BOT. Power-packed and Smart!

Can’t wait to transform your business’ slack channel into an IT help desk? Get in touch with and we’d be more than happy to give you a demo. 

1. How does the integration of Slack with existing software applications enhance the efficiency of IT support processes, and what are some specific examples of tasks that can be automated using Slack's integration with tools like Jira Cloud, HubSpot, or Freshservice?

The article mentions that Slack can integrate with various existing software applications used by businesses, but it does not provide detailed examples of how this integration can streamline IT support processes. Understanding specific use cases or tasks that can be automated through Slack's integration with tools like Jira Cloud or Freshservice could help readers grasp the practical benefits of leveraging Slack for internal IT support.

2. What are the potential challenges or limitations organizations might face when implementing Slack Chatbots for IT Helpdesk operations, particularly in terms of user adoption, security concerns, or customization requirements?

While the article highlights the benefits of using Slack Chatbots for IT Helpdesk operations, it does not address any potential challenges or limitations that organizations may encounter during implementation. Exploring issues such as user adoption, data security, or the need for customization could help readers understand the complexities involved in deploying Slack Chatbots effectively within their organizations.

3. How does the Workativ Assistant platform facilitate the creation and deployment of Slack Chatbots, and what features does it offer to enhance the functionality and customization of these chatbots?

The article mentions the Workativ Assistant platform as a solution for building Slack Chatbots but does not provide details on how organizations can leverage this platform or what capabilities it offers for customization. Clarifying the features and functionalities of the Workativ Assistant platform, as well as the process of creating and deploying Slack Chatbots using this platform, could help readers understand the practical steps involved in implementing Slack Chatbots for IT Helpdesk support.