Appearance
Overview
Overdesk's Slack app brings your support queue into the channels your team already reads. Scheduled reports and analyses arrive without anyone opening Overdesk, and so does an alert whenever a guardrail escalates a conversation to a person. Anyone in the channel can ask the bot for a report, a draft or a quick answer.
What it does
| Feature | How it works |
|---|---|
| Reports, analyses and escalation alerts | Overdesk posts your scheduled reports and analyses to the channel you choose, plus an alert each time a guardrail escalates a conversation to a person. You decide which of the three go to Slack. Every other alert, such as a failed draft, stays on the Alerts page. See Escalation. |
| Slash commands | /overdesk report weekly_summary posts a report on the spot, /overdesk draft starts a draft for one conversation, and /overdesk stats shows your numbers. See Slash commands. |
| Ask Overdesk | Your team asks plain-English questions about drafts, AI spend, tickets, jobs and reports, and gets a short answer from your workspace data. See Ask Overdesk. |
Connecting Slack works on every plan. Ask Overdesk is part of the Pro and Scale plans, and of the free trial.
Where it lives
An admin connects Slack from Integrations. The channel is set on the Slack page there, and Settings → Notifications decides which kinds of message go to it. See Connecting Slack.
What the app can see
When you approve the app, Slack asks you to let it post messages, read basic details of your channels, receive messages that @mention it, and add the /overdesk command. That is the whole list. The app cannot read the conversations in your channels, only the messages that mention it and the commands your team types.
What it never does
Overdesk never messages a customer, and connecting Slack changes nothing about that. A draft you ask for in Slack is placed in your help desk like every other draft, where it waits for a person on your team to read, edit and send it. The one exception is a FreeScout draft reply on an API and Webhooks module older than 1.0.103, which may be sent: see Where drafts go.
When a report is posted to Slack, the names of the customers on your conversations appear as (customer).