Using Slackbot for reasons other than pranking your team
You may have had some fun using Slack to leave cleaver word traps for your teammates. I certainly have:
Over time though, I began to realize that our team could leverage Slackbot as a lightweight mechanism to serve up some common info from our knowledge base. Our team uses a mix of our own software and Confluence as a wiki for our business, but this should work just fine for teams that use google docs or any other cloud-based document collaboration tools. The only thing you need is a link to access specific files.
To start, go to customize slack. Once in the Customize Your Workspace view, select the Slackbot tab. From here, select Add new response. In the “when someone says…” field, place in a few key phrases to trigger the response (we find that 2–3 key phrases made up of 1–3 words each seems to work well). In the adjacent “slack bot responds…” field, enter the related wiki/document link. Click save, and you’re done.
Pretty easy, so why did I write a whole article about it?
Once you’ve accumulated about 10–20 of these keyword link responses, recalling them will become more cumbersome. So, in addition, I recommend adding a keyword to list your other keywords. This is equivalent to the --help flag used in most command line tools and should just summarize your keywords and what they do.
Since our team is rather quirky, we opted to have the word meeseeks to serve as our keyword to accomplish this (you might simply just opt for --help for simplicity).
Here’s what it’ll look like once you’ve configured a few keywords:
*This strategy works best if all members have the ability to customize Slackbot
Why bother?
Like us, you may have your knowledge base filled with a variety of useful docs to answer just about anything for your systems, but how often do you get a common question leading you to open a new tab to open Google Docs or Confluence just to have to recall what folder or space that relevant how-to document lives? Sure, the person asking could try and find the info themselves, but the fastest way to get the info they need is by accessing your brain directly.
Offloading this cognitive work to Slackbot allows it to serve as an interceptor to your brain when common questions pop up. This will save some time and mental load from the more senior members of your team and allow the more junior members to be a little more self-sufficient.
Our team has found it especially handy for new people. After going through onboarding, there seems to be a gap in reaching a solid understanding of each of our systems. This strategy with Slackbot seems to bridge that gap a bit better (in tandem with mentorship and other strategies, of course).
This can also help as a little assistant for customer service, especially if you have an Intercom integration (or equivalent). When users need help, you can have Slackbot serve up some common issue solutions very quickly based on their stated keywords.
To prank or not to prank?
Next time you are setting up a witty trap on Slack you might as well leave a handy link or two about a question you hear at least once a week. It will save a bit of time and sanity for everyone on your team.
