Ability to browse TKB via Slack, for internal users

[rose_cobb]

Hello, 

I received an interesting request from our Support team. Is there a way to integrate Slack and Khoros Communities so that users can browse through Knowledge Base Articles through Slack? 

Here is the scenario: 

The Support team has their own Slack channel where they talk about cases. Users are in the channel chatting about the case and want to look up a Compass article that may apply. They have to leave the conversation in Slack, open Compass, perform the search, copy the link and paste into Slack. 

That may not seem like a great deal of work, but to folks who are trying to resolve cases rapidly, that pivot can be disruptive. It would be beneficial if they could initiate a command in Slack that would allow them to browse and then share the article without ever leaving the chat.  

Has anyone else done anything like this? Is that even possible? Please share your thoughts, I would love to hear how you tackled similar scenarios in your community! 

FYI - there are two more discussions about Slack Integrations here and here. 

[StanGromer]

Honestly, I love the idea of this integration, so much so I just looked up how I'll make it happen 🤣

So in our situation, we actually leverage Coveo as our search appliance - It ties together multiple sources of data (Khoros, our dotcom site, our help documentation site, SFDC content, etc).  So in this situation, we actually need to expose our Coveo instance w/ Slack, not Khoros directly.  Luckily, It looks like Coveo has a project out there to get me started to do the integration, allowing for users in slack to search & post content easily -> https://github.com/coveo-labs/slack-bot

So - May not be the most helpful answer in your specific situation, but there is definitely solutions for the the problem itself!

[RahulHa]

Thanks for this post @rose_cobb and your comments @StanGromer. 

Glad to share that Community integration with Slack is on the cards. Four use cases we are considering as part of the solution planned as part of this year's roadmap.

1. Discuss in Slack:This will enable to quickly pull together a team in Slack to collaborate in real-time about a specific post in the Community. 

At times it is necessary to share a post from the Community with a specific set of people that can come together and disperse easily enabling a private back-channel conversation where the team can work together to discuss and resolve the issue quickly. 

2. Notifications: Get notified with a preview/snippet of the activity. This will be an additional option for Community notifications.

3. Engagement: This builds on notifications to enable quick & simple Community actions from Slack directly like Kudo, Mark as Accepted Solution, Un-subscribe etc.

4. Search: Search Community from Slack directly.

Hope this helps. We propose to extend this integration to other internal collaboration tools like MS Teams as well.

Please do share your feedback and also any additional use cases you would like us to consider. Please let us know if you would like more details or have any questions. 

- Khoros Product Team

[rose_cobb]

@StanGromer Thank you for sharing that! I like to hear how other communities tackle the same problem, it definitely helps with thinking of how we want to handle ours. 

@RahulHa I am happy to hear that Khoros is investigating this type of integration. The use cases that I am most interested in are 1. Discuss in Slack and 4. Search. 

Search actually sounds like what our teams are looking for, being able to search for articles so that they can quickly find and use that link in support responses. Did I infer that correctly or is Khoros going in a different direction with Search? 

Thanks again for your responses! 😄 

[RahulHa]

@rose_cobb Yes, that is correct and is the the plan with Search.

@SumantMa 

[TreyWaddell]

Awesome to hear @RahulHa - is there a rough estimate of when this is planned for release? Summer? EOY? Just a rough idea is great - thanks!

[StanGromer]

@RahulHa  I totally missed responding to this.  I'm a bit curious myself, do any Khoros Communities try to use Community as an internal intranet?  As that is where I would be excited to use some of this functionality with our internal teams (vs. much of our community is external, and thus wouldn't get the benefits of Slack).

Discuss in Slack - This is excellent and would love it regardless, but what about the other direction from slack into Community?  Something I have become a huge fan of within Slack is creating a jira ticket directly from slack - This lets me grab the info the user sent in a message/channel, and immediately action off it.  Have you looked into something similar to allow a Slack convo to move into Community?

Notifications - Love it!

Engagement - This may play into what I said above about discussions, but yes!  Anything that can tie the two together so they act like a tight integration vs. just dumping information from one platform onto the other 

Search - Edit - I love this depending on how it would be implemented, as we utilize a unified search, and don't use Khoros search any longer, so would want to understand how it would work/how we would still be able to leverage this if we are not/do not wish to use Khoros search, and how it would interact within Slack itself.

[RahulHa]

@TreyWaddell @StanGromer  Thanks for your comments and inputs. We will keep these in mind as we finalize the requirements. Timeline-wise, we are looking at releasing a version around early H2, this year.

Yes, Khoros Communities can be set up to internal audiences as well and in fact, this community, Atlas has an internal version through roles/permissions. And you are right @StanGromer , the use cases we are planning to tackle with Slack integration are targeted at the internal audience (Community Admin, Manager, Moderators, other employees) of a brand and not the end-users who are external to the brand.

Posting a message from Slack to Community is something we are considering as part of Discuss in Slack. After swarming on a topic, as an option to post an update back on the Community. Outside of that, any specific use cases/scenarios you have in mind where ability to move a Slack conversation to Community, would come handy? 

With Search, the plan is make the Community Search available right within Slack. This is in addition to the search that Slack offers natively on the Slack instance. 

[tealiumjustin]

Many of the features discussed here can be accomplished with the existing Khoros API and creating a custom Slack command or slash command. One of the first integrations we built in Slack was the ability to search our community using a slash command. I'm constantly reminding our internal users in Slack that they can search our knowledge base directly from Slack.

I've also prototyped a knowledge base creation command. It works in two ways:

1. For any question posted in Slack, I can query our KB for matches. If a match is found, I paste the URL as a response and tell the user how I got the answer.

2. If a matching KB is not found, I use the second integration command to create a draft KB article based on the Slack thread. It copies the entire thread conversation into a draft TKB and posts back the URL. Then I edit it to clean it up and share the newly created KB in the thread. Again, reminding everyone how I did it.

Here's how it looks in our Slack:

It's an uphill battle getting users to adopt these new features. Everyone is habituated in Slack to just ask/reply, but I'm optimistic that it will catch on the more I demonstrate it.

[SumantMa]

Thanks for the ideas @rose_cobb @StanGromer @tealiumjustin ! 

Quick update: In terms of integrating Community with Slack we are focussing on following use-cases to begin with-

1. Notifications: Community notifications will also flow into slack, similar to email notifications. These would allow users to preview the activity in slack notification itself, such as notifications for subscription and @mentions.

2. Quick actions: Users can take quick community actions from slack notification itself, such as Kudo or reply on the post.

Sample mock-up:

3. Search: Users will be able to search community from slack, enabling them to find out as well as share information internally faster.

Sample mock-up:

We are currently working on these, and would be happy to get more ideas/suggestions for future iterations.