Integrations (Slack)

With the Slack integration, your team can watch and join chatbot conversations without leaving Slack.

• Every chat becomes one thread in a Slack channel you choose.
• The visitor's messages, the AI's answers and your team's replies all appear in that thread.
• When a visitor asks for a human, a highlighted message is also posted to the channel itself so nobody misses it.
• Reply in the thread and your message goes straight to the visitor. The AI pauses so you and the bot do not talk over each other.

Open it from Integrations in the left-hand menu.

Before you start

You need to be able to create an app in your Slack workspace. It takes about five minutes.

1. Go to the Slack API site and create a new app from scratch for your workspace.
2. Open OAuth & Permissions and add the bot scopes chat:write, plus channels:history (public channels) and/or groups:history (private channels).
3. Install the app to your workspace and copy the Bot User OAuth Token. It starts with xoxb-.
4. Open Basic Information → App Credentials and copy the Signing Secret.
5. In Slack, pick or create the channel for your chats and invite the bot: type /invite @your-app-name.
6. Open the channel's details and copy the Channel ID from the bottom of the About tab. It looks like C0123ABCD.

Connect HelpNest

1. In HelpNest, open Integrations.
2. Paste the Bot token and Signing secret, and enter the Channel ID. Use the ID, not the channel name.
3. Keep Send chats to Slack ticked.
4. Click Connect Slack. HelpNest checks the token with Slack before saving.

Your secrets are never shown again after saving. To change other settings later, leave the token and secret boxes empty and the saved values are kept.

Turn on replies from Slack

After connecting, a Receive replies from Slack box appears with a unique Request URL.

1. In your Slack app, open Event Subscriptions and switch them on.
2. Paste the Request URL. Slack verifies it straight away.
3. Under Subscribe to bot events, add message.channels (public channel) and/or message.groups (private channel), then save.

Click Send test message to confirm the bot can post to your channel.

How it behaves

• Only replies typed by a person inside a chat's thread are delivered. Messages from bots, edits and replies in other channels are ignored.
• If the chat has already ended, Slack shows a warning in the thread and the visitor does not receive the message.
• If Slack is slow or unavailable, your visitors are not affected. The chat carries on normally.

Disconnect

Click Disconnect to stop syncing. Existing threads stay in Slack but no new messages are mirrored.