Slack Connect channel
Turn shared Slack channels with your customers into Ochre conversations. Replies from the inbox land back in the original Slack thread.
What this is
Slack Connect lets you share a channel between your workspace and a customer's Slack workspace. They post in their Slack, you see it in yours, in the same channel. It's the standard way mid-market and enterprise customers talk to vendors today.
Slack Connect channels live alongside your internal Slack channels and they're easy to miss. Messages get lost. Replies are inconsistent. SLAs are vibes-based.
Ochre treats each Slack Connect channel as a source for conversations, just like email or the widget. Customer posts, it lands in the inbox with all the same routing, status, assignment, and AI behavior. Agent replies from the Ochre inbox, and the reply lands back in the original Slack thread.
Setup
You need to be a Slack admin in your workspace to install. Then:
- Go to Settings → Channels → Slack and click Connect to Slack.
- Authorize the Ochre Slack app for your workspace.
- Pick which Slack Connect channels Ochre should watch.
- For each channel, link it to a customer organization. This is what associates the messages with a known customer record.
After install, every new top-level message in those channels creates a conversation. Replies in the thread are appended to that conversation.
How conversations are created
By default, top-level messages in watched channels create new conversations. Thread replies append to the conversation created by the top-level message.
Slack Connect / external-workspace messages include the author's profile inline (since users.info won't resolve foreign users from our bot token), so we attribute the post to the right person. For same-workspace users we fall back to users.info to enrich the profile.
Replying
When you reply to a Slack-sourced conversation from the Ochre inbox, the reply is posted back into Slack as a message in the original thread. The customer sees a normal Slack message with the agent's name and avatar.
If the conversation has multiple messages going back and forth, all of them sync. The Slack thread and the Ochre conversation stay in lockstep.
Ochre renders markdown, lists, and links into native Slack formatting.
Identifying customers
Each Slack Connect channel is linked to a customer organization at install time. Messages are attributed to whoever posted; Ochre matches the Slack user's email to an existing end user when possible, and creates one when there's no match.
For shared channels with multiple people on the customer side, each person gets their own end user record over time as they post.
Internal-only replies
To discuss a Slack-sourced conversation internally without the customer seeing, use Internal notes on the conversation in Ochre. Internal notes never get posted back to Slack.
What about regular Slack channels (non-Connect)?
You can also watch regular channels (your team's #support channel, for example) and create conversations from them. Useful for surfacing internal escalations into the same inbox.
What's next
- If Slack messages aren't routing into Ochre, check the Slack Events API webhook in your Slack app's admin and the channel-watch list in Settings → Channels → Slack.
- Read the Channels overview.
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