Slack is super cool, and many businesses worldwide use it! It helps everyone in a team, whether developers or others, to talk to each other and stay updated on what's going on. Even though people mainly use Slack to work together, it's also great for handling internal and external customer support requests, like a ticketing system.

If you want to know how Slack can better manage customer requests, help you work on those support requests faster, and make your service team more effective, you've come to the right place. In this article, we'll show you how to use Slack to help customers who ask for help in a channel, giving them personal attention.

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Can Slack Be Used as a Ticketing System?

Yes! Even though Slack doesn't have built-in ticketing features — it's not a ticketing system straight out of the box — you can still make it act like one. Slack can help you create, discuss, and resolve tickets, almost like you would normally in a ticketing application, while just chatting in Slack. It is common to use basic Slack functionality like Emojis and Lists to convert messages to Tickets and signal completion. Turning Slack into a ticketing system makes handling tickets easier and improves customer and employee experience, especially since your team (including your customers) already knows how to use it.

For those looking for a more powerful ticketing system within Slack can explore Apps like ClearFeed, Linear Asks, Atlassian Assist and others. These convert messages into Tickets in a classic Ticketing System. For example Atlassian Assist converts messages to tickets in JSM, Linear Asks to tasks in Linear and ClearFeed to tickets in ClearFeed, Zendesk, Jira or ClickUp. While being Slack and conversation friendly - these systems also allow tracking each issue, response times, SLA breaches, incidents, forms and fields - in a methodical manner.

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Who Uses Slack as a Ticketing System?

Slack is utilized across a variety of teams and businesses. This system particularly suits IT, sales, and customer support teams seeking a chat-based collaborative workspace for interfacing with their customers. Here is a brief overview of the use cases:

1. IT Team: Slack simplifies task execution and team connection by acting as a hub for IT support. It integrates with IT infrastructure like Okta, JumpCloud and Kandji and with ticketing systems like Zendesk, JSM, or FreshService, empowering teams to handle, create, update, and resolve technical support tickets within Slack's user-friendly interface.

“Slack and its plug-and-play integrations have made our employee experience better by masking the complexity of where to go to have conversations, get approvals and find answers.”

- Apsara Sivamurthy, Vice President, End User Technologies and Experience, Paramount (Src)

2. Sales Team: For salespersons frequently managing multiple customer dialogues, Slack helps the sales team respond to customer needs rapidly and efficiently while understanding their business objectives. This organizational tool allows sales teams to maintain a comprehensive customer data repository, promptly addressing follow-up inquiries or concerns.

“Slack Sales Elevate brings CRM to a system that Sales already knows and loves: Slack. It weaves all their work within a user-friendly platform, making pipeline management and actionable business insights infinitely more accessible and efficient.”

- Lauren Farber, Director, Business Operations, Roku (Src)

3. Customer Support Team: With Slack, customer support teams can manage and track customer projects proficiently. Tickets can monitor each task's progress, delegate duties, and register potential issues or client-requested modifications.

Related Read: Learn how Chronosphere, a cloud-native observability platform, streamlined customer support operations by leveraging Slack as a ticketing platform with ClearFeed

4. Engineering Team: Slack, utilized as a ticketing system, accelerates product development by streamlining DevOps workflows, automating incident responses, and minimizing context switching for developers — resulting in enhanced productivity and efficient deployment.

“Our Slack integrations empower developers to deploy from development machines to test environments to production environments in a very short period of time”

- Paul Whyte, Head of Systems Engineering, Vodafone U.K. (Src)

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How to Use Slack as a Ticketing System?

Slack provides a powerful tool for team collaboration with its features and integrations. You can use Slack as a makeshift ticketing system to maximize its potential. Here’s how:

1. Setup Dedicated Channels: Create specific channels for distinct issues, departments, or teams. Each channel serves as a separate line for communication and ticket resolution so that the conversations remain organized and context-focused. It can also reflect the structure of your organization or the nature of commonly received customer requests.

2. Use One Slack Thread for Each Ticket/Issue: By dedicating a single thread to each issue, you can keep the related discussion, updates, and resolution steps in one place. This improves the communication's clarity and helps track the status or pending actions about a ticket.

3. Using Emojis to Signal Status: Visual cues can significantly enhance your ticket management process. Emojis are a fun and efficient way to represent ticket status. For instance, a green tick ✅ emoji can indicate a ticket's successful resolution, and a red button 🔴 emoji can flag high-priority issues.

4. Using Slack Workflows and Its Form Interface for Structured Requests: Slack's in-built workflows can automate routine interactions and processes such as ticket intake. The form interface feature allows users to submit detailed information about their issues or requests, ensuring that all necessary data is captured immediately, minimizing extensive back-and-forths.

5. Employing Slack Workflows for Notification: Notifications can alert the responsible teams or individuals when creating a new ticket. This ensures immediate attention is drawn towards the task at hand. With Slack workflows, you can automate these notifications, speeding up the ticketing process and response time.

6. Integrating with Third-party Applications: Through Slack's integrations with ticketing systems like ClearFeed, Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, ClickUp, Hubspot ServiceHub, SalesForce Service Cloud or Jira, you can manage notifications, assign tickets, adjust priorities, and help resolve issues, all directly from Slack. This integration provides a seamless and effective ticketing system within your team's communication platform.

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The Shortcomings of Slack as a Ticketing System

Slack is an incredibly useful tool for communication and collaboration. But it has limitations. If you're using Slack as a ticketing system, here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Lack of Query Options for Ticket Status: There's no native feature in Slack to search specifically for tickets by their status, such as finding all open tickets. Users may rely on emoji statuses or keywords as a workaround to filter relevant tickets, but the process can become cumbersome.

2. Inability to Manage Assignees, Priority, or Shifts: Slack doesn't offer built-in features to manage ticket assignments, priority levels, or shift scheduling. Teams must find workarounds through conventions, integrations, or manual updates.

3. Limited Analytics: While Slack provides some analytics data, it's too high-level to offer meaningful insights into metrics like responsiveness, ticket resolution time, or agent performance in the context of ticket management.

4. Inadequate SLA Management and Alerts: Slack lacks native support for managing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) or creating SLA alerts. This absence can impact an organization's ability to uphold service standards and monitor service quality.

5. Restricted Private Collaboration Among Agents: Slack agents cannot privately collaborate on a ticket without creating separate channels or direct messages, leading to fragmented communication. This limitation may hinder efficient ticket resolution.

6. Absence of a Customer Portal: Slack doesn't provide a 'Customer Portal' where employees or customers can review and check the status of their submitted tickets. This narrows down visibility and makes it difficult for users to stay on top of their requests.

While Slack is certainly a great team communications tool, using it strictly as a ticketing system could pose several challenges. To overcome these challenges - Slack must be paired with a Ticketing System that is Slack-Native. Our favorite are tools like Linear Asks, Atlassian Assist + JSM, ClearFeed and to some extent FreshService.

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What are some must-have features for a Slack Ticketing System

Slack is a powerful communication tool - but not really purpose built for a Ticketing System. If you are looking to implement a Slack-native ticketing system - here are some top features to look for:

1. Manual and Automatic creation of tickets: from Slack channels, including private channels
2. Creation of tickets privately: either from shortcuts or private actions
3. Bi-Directional Sync between Tickets and Threads: Users and Agents can reply from Slack or Ticketing software and the two are kept in sync seamlessly
4. Excellent Forms implementation within Slack: to allow creation of structured tickets in Slack
5. Email Integration: Not all tickets can be created in Slack and solutions must allow creation of Tickets over Email as well
6. Slack-Native Workbench for Agents: Allow Agents to monitor, manage and respond to Tickets from right within Slack (from Triage Channels for eg)
7. Integrated with Knowledge Sources: to deflect queries right within Slack
8. Alerting and notification functionality within Slack: so users can stay alerted about tickets breaching SLAs or events like assignee changes right within Slack
9. Built-in workflows like Approvals and Escalations: important workflows should be routed right within Slack across participants for faster and easier response
10. Service Metrics incorporate responses & actions in Slack: Users and Agents can reply directly in Slack and metrics kept updated
11. Integration with existing Enterprise software: Fetch Info and Update CRM, Asset Management, HRIS and other systems from right within Slack
12. Security: SoC2 or ISO27001 certified with strong controls over data access, sorage and retention

Legacy vendors like Zendesk, FreshService, ClickUp struggle with many of these - particularly Bi-Directional Sync, Automatic Ticket Filing, Knowledge Source integrations and bots, Slack Alerting and Service Metrics. This is where modern dedicated vendors like ClearFeed come in.

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What are some common ways of creating Tickets in Slack

Depending on the solution, these are some standard ways:

• Automatic Ticket Creation from every message in a Slack Channel.
• Manual Ticket Creation by using Emojis or Tagging
• Private Ticket Creation by using a Slack ShortCut
• Conversion of Direct Messages to Tickets using Slack Message Actions
• Creation of Tickets by using Slack Workflow Actions - with the Trigger Action being configurable via Slack Automations
• Automatic Creation of Tickets from specific Bot Alerts and SlackBot Email posts
• Workflow Actions Pinned to a Channel

Regardless of the method of ticket creation - there should be a Slack thread where Agents and Users can respond on the Ticket - with Agent or User identification by Ticketing system.

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How to manage IT tickets in Slack?

IT teams require a robust ticketing system to keep track and close all issues reliably. Messages in Slack can easily get lost and are not, by themselves, a solution for Ticketing. Using a Slack Ticketing System (like ClearFeed, Linear Asks or Atlassian Assist), they can setup a system as follows:

• Setup Forms for different issue types.
• Setup Ticket submission protocols via Slack Channels and ShortCuts.
• Route Tickets based on the selected Form Type to the appropriate Queue within the IT team.
• Represent Queues via Triage Channels in Slack, where Agents are notified of new Tickets and can work on them.
• Setup Alerting on pending responses or closure time - to continuously flag Tickets that need attention.
• Setup AI-Agents to post instant responses and auto-resolve employee concerns to reduce work for human Agents.
• Integrate tools like Okta, Kandji, AssetPanda into their flows so most tickets can be resolved from Slack directly.

Slack provides a great set of underlying features like instant messaging, threading, emojis, notifications, workflows and forms - but these are best bought together as a Ticketing solution by using a solution like ClearFeed, Atlassian Assist, Linear Asks, FreshService or Zendesk.

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How to Support Customers on Slack?

Customer Support is a common use case for Ticketing in Slack. Modern B2B Support is increasingly embracing Slack Connect and MS Teams for Customer Support and Onboarding, while Support teams are also increasingly working out of Slack, along with their colleagues from Engineering and Solutions and Product to work on Customer issues. A good implementation of Support on Slack would:

• Be able to manage hundreds of customers across Slack and MS Teams - by bringing their conversations into a centralized Dashboard.
• Unify conversations across Email, Slack, Web Chat, Support Portal etc - into one single unified queue of conversations for tracking.
• Collaborate with customers without imposing formal Ticketing everywhere - by tracking conversations in Slack internally.
• Answer customer questions using AI Agents trained on company documentation and KBs.
• Proactively raise alerts on pending responses or on urgent customer asks for high responsiveness.
• Integrate with CRM systems inside the company to provide and maintain a unified customer view across different systems.
• Be able to bulk message customers over Slack and be able to track and handle all responses seamlessly.

While existing Customer Support solutions like Intercom, Zendesk, SalesForce Service Cloud and FreshDesk have built extensive Slack integrations, they often fall short of a comprehensive solution for Slack based Support. Readers can read this Guide on Customer Support on Slack for a fuller guide on this topic and take a look at vendors like ClearFeed that specialize in providing solutions in this area.

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Is it possible to integrate with existing CRM and Ticketing systems from Slack?

Yes! Very much so. There are two primary ways of doing this:

1. Use the Ticketing Vendor's Slack Integration - For example Zendesk, Intercom, FreshDesk all over Slack integrations that allow creation of Tickets from Slack and notifications in Slack. But they usually do not provide bi-directional syncing across the CRM and Slack and also fall short in managing large number of Channels, offering a place in Slack for Support and Solutions Engineering to collaborate with Customers etc. On the positive side - vendor integrations are usually bundled for free.
2. Use a Slack-Native Ticketing System with Integrations: A different approach is to use a specialized system like ClearFeed to manage conversations within Slack - while doing a deep integration with existing CRM and Ticketing Systems like Zendesk, Intercom, FreshDesk, SalesForce Service Cloud, Hubspot Service Hub, ClickUp, Linear etc. The downside is there's an added cost of an additional vendor - with the benefit of enabling a different style of collaboration across customers and internal teams that goes well beyond traditional ticketing.
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What are some of the top Slack Apps for Ticketing

The popularity of Slack as a communication tool within companies has led to a variety of vendors who are providing Ticketing Solutions on Slack. Here are some of the best known ones:

• Atlassian Assist + JSM: Jira Service Management is a well known IT Ticketing system and offers a great ticketing solution for Slack. This product was earlier famous as Halp - the first Slack Native Ticketing System. On the downside, it can be expensive and lacks integrations outside the Atlassian Ecosystem.
• ClearFeed: A Ticketing System purpose built for Slack where the entire lifecycle of a Ticket can be taken care of within Slack. Its known for it's extensive integrations with other Ticketing Systems, Knowledge Sources and ITSM Systems.
• Linear Asks: Linear is a famous Project Management tool and Asks converts it into a Service Desk on Slack. While Asks is popular for Internal Ticketing, it is not designed for Customer Support and is lacking in some areas like Service Metrics and SLAs.
• FreshService: Another well known ITSM system with mature ticketing functionality and extensive automations. It has a good Slack integration for employees and users - but is not designed for Agents to work out of Slack.

We have published an extensive survey of the top Ticketing Systems for Slack on our blog.

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ClearFeed’s Slack Ticketing System

ClearFeed is a Slack ticketing system that transforms Slack channels into Helpdesks, allowing you to create, respond to, and close tickets directly from Slack. The solution streamlines workflow, ensures quick responses, and resolves queries faster with AI-powered features, such as ticket creation with just 1-click. Some of ClearFeed's key features include:

1. Manual or automatic ticket creation from Slack messages. You can create tickets manually by selecting a Slack message and using 🎫emoji or automatically create tickets in response by enabling the feature in ClearFeed’s web app.

2. Private collaboration on tickets within Slack. Once a ticket has been created from a Slack message, team members can start a private thread linked to that ticket by using 🔒 emoji. This allows you to discuss, share updates, brainstorm solutions, or seek approvals without divulging sensitive information to the whole channel or cluttering it with ongoing ticket discussions.

3. AI-powered answers using GPT integration. You can integrate Slack with your existing Knowledge Base, automatically suggest relevant KB articles for new questions, save Slack discussions into the KB with a single click, and generate automatic responses to customer inquiries, creating a seamless, efficient, and automated support process within the app.

4. SLA alerts and Slack insights about response times and other service metrics. When a ticket risks violating service agreements, detailed analysis of response times, and metrics on overall service performance, you can enable automatic reminders on Slack to ensure that the necessary attention and resources are allocated promptly to meet the SLA.

5. Automation, like out-of-office responses and CSAT surveys upon ticket closure. ClearFeed's auto response feature provides out-of-office responses to manage customer expectations during non-business hours or staff unavailability. You can also automate the delivery of Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys after ticket resolution, ensuring smooth customer interactions and valuable feedback for service improvement.

                Related Read: Learn how ClearFeed helps manage customer expectations with Automated OOO replies

6. Bi-directional integration with other support and engineering tools. You can enable a bi-directional integration with your Slack workspace and other ticketing systems (Zendesk, Freshdesk, etc.), CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot, etc.), and engineering tools (Jira, Github, etc.) to synchronize data exchange and improve cross-functional collaboration.

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Interested in discovering how ClearFeed can improve your customer help service by using Slack for help requests and growing your support team? We're just one phone call away, ready to help you make this change.

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Frequently asked questions

1. How to manage Ticket Routing and SLAs directly within Slack?

Some of the standard practices for this:

• Establish different Triage Channels in Slack for different types of Tickets
• Ask users to fill in Ticket Type during request submission - or use AI for categorization
• Route Ticket to the appropriate Triage channel based on the Form or Issue type
• Categorize responses on Slack by user type - Agent vs. Requester - and track response time based on this
• Add actions to resolve Tickets in Slack (eg: emojis) - and track closure time based on actions

Unfortunately, most of these functionalities are not directly available in Slack itself and you would need a Slack-native ticketing system (like ClearFeed) to implement these practices.

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2. Can I create Tickets from Slack DMs?

A persistent issue with Slack is users will often reach out with their issues directly over DM. Conversion of such Direct Messages to Tickets is usually done via Slack Actions. These are the Actions available via the ... menu on hovering over a message in Slack. Ticketing vendors provide an Action to convert the DM to a ticket. A great Slack-native solution would automatically create a thread for the Ticket requester and keep it in sync with the Ticket comments and status.

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3. Can I use Slack Lists as a Ticketing System

Slack Lists are a cool new feature in Slack that allows teams and users to maintain a list of tasks. However, they are not really designed for ticketing. For instance, Slack Lists does not track response times (and does not have the notion of Agents vs. Customers (or Employees)). Anyone can change the fields of a Slack LIst, unlike Support Ticketing where Support teams want full control over Ticket Schema. However, Slack Lists does make it very easy to create List Items from anywhere in Slack and maybe useful for small teams who want to easily track a list of Tasks in Slack.

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