Slack and Zendesk two-way support system migrated to Foqal from Halp
Using Slack for support is becoming more common. However, once you start casually supporting on Slack, you may find it difficult to manage your workload and tasks properly, leading to exhaustion from managing the ever-increasing Slack channels over time. On the other hand, if you revert entirely to the traditional ticket system, you might feel like you’ve somehow lost by a technology.
Therefore, I believe it’s important, as AWS does, to seamlessly integrate your company’s ticket system with Slack apps.
As I mentioned in this past post, at Treasure Data, we’ve been using a service called Halp for support on Slack for the past 7–8 years, which allows bidirectional communication with Zendesk. However, after the acquisition by Atlassian, the integration with Zendesk is planned be discontinued by this June. We decided to use a service called Foqal based on recommendations from my support engneer network and after comparing it with similar services.
What is Foqal?
It’s a support service focused on providing customer support using Slack or Microsoft Teams or others. It also can operate as a standalone support system, but it can also seamlessly integrate with support systems like Zendesk.
After various investigations by myself, there have been several Slack-integrated support services in recent years. Some of them focus on the proactive support by Customer Success teams, so it will be necessary to see how things develop in the future to determine which ones will survive. For example, there are services like the following. They generally have similar features, but their strengths vary depending on the company’s direction.
The reason we chose Foqal was mainly because the company was serious about creating a tool for support, and also because of recommendations from acquaintances (who happened to migrate from Halp at that company).
As for Foqal’s unique strengths, it allows for various automation workflows for ticket events. Additionally, apart from ticket creation using emojis, it also offers popup displays in channels
Notable Features
1 — Workflow can be set up for each emoji.
2 — Workflow can be set up for each channel or channel tag.
For example, workflows can be changed for partner Slack channels and internal Slack channels, allowing the switching of Zendesk form templates.
3 — It can display input forms synced with Zendesk form templates.
The input form shown earlier is based on Zendesk’s form. Therefore, users can input necessary information from Slack similar to Zendesk.
4 — It allows for mass notifications to channels.
For example, when you need to inform about support suspension periods, you can send notifications to channels or specific tags all at once.
With these features, migration from Halp is easy, and additional benefits can be obtained, making it quite good.
Implementation
When actually implementing Foqal, I first used the Zendesk Sandbox to check settings. Foqal’s flexible workflows have some quirks in settings. For example, when channel and global settings conflict, it’s unclear which takes priority, or which information is obtained using which action in the workflow, which can be confusing at first. However, during implementation, Foqal provided excellent onboarding support. They even recorded videos on how to handle specific behaviors, providing thorough assistance.
Conclusion
We began operation from the second week of this month, and we’re currently handling around 20 tickets a day from Slack (along with many tickets from sources other than Slack). In the future, we hope to continue smoothly handling inquiries from both internal and external sources on Slack.
