Contact for Slack

A simple solution to receive and reply to contact messages from within Slack.

Add to Slack

Via Email

People can contact your team via email. Receive and reply to messages from within Slack.

Via Form

People can contact your team via a form. Receive and reply from within Slack.

Threaded Conversations

Messages are kept together in Slack threads, making it easier to review previous messages in the conversation.

Advanced Features

Multiple channels, custom fields, webhook support, automatic language translation and more!

How it Works

After installing Contact for Slack, you can choose any Slack channel to receive customer contact messages. For most teams, it probably makes sense to dedicate a channel for this purpose, and conduct team chat in other channels. Once you invite @Contact to the channel, you can enable it for Contact. A custom email address and web form URL will be created for the channel.

You can share the email address directly, or create an email address on your domain and forward it to the channel email. Either way, it is never a good idea to publish an email address to a web site, as this will invite spammers.

If you choose the (recommended) web form option, you can create your own form or use a hosted version of the form that is also created automatically. (The hosted form is also a quick and easy way to send a test message when you are just trying things out!) Whether messages originate via email or form, they arrive in the Slack channel. To reply, create a thread and post a reply to the thread -- your reply will get sent via email. The recipient can reply to that email, and that reply will also arrive in Slack, in the same message thread. Keeping all the messages of a single conversation in the same thread make it easier to review past messages and provides important context when new replies come in.

Tip: when you @mention another slack user in a Contact message thread, it will not be sent out by email -- so you can @mention other team members to ask a question or assign the conversation to them.

Missing Features

Contact for Slack is designed to be a simple solution for managing outside contacts from within Slack. It will be a good fit for some teams, but not others. It is not intended to be -- nor aspires to become -- a full-fledged customer support ticketing system. For teams of a certain size, those kinds of solutions can be too expensive or too complicated (or both). Contact for Slack may be well suited to such teams, that may be currently use email or basic form-to-email solutions for managing outside contact messages. Bring those into Slack can make them easier to manage for teams who already do much of their internal communication in Slack. And because Slack channels can be viewed by multiple team members, the team can all view incoming messages and collaborate on responses.

Another missing feature is real-time chat. If this is an important feature for your team, there are a number of good solutions in Slack App Directory that provide chat features. Contact for Slack is not intended to be a direct alternative to those.

For setup details, including sample form HTML, install Contact for Slack and then do @Contact help. To view Contact for Slack in the Slack App Directory, click here (coming soon).

Premium Features

Contact has both free and paid plans. All features are included free for the first 30 days (no credit card required). After the 30 day trial, the following premium features are only available on the Pro or Plus plans.

Multiple Channels. By enabling multiple channels for Contact, you can setup separate emails and/or forms for different functions and/or sub-teams. For example, #customer-support for customer messages and #sales-leads for sales contacts from your web site. Each channel can be used only by the team members who need to see/manage those messages.

Email Attachments. Supported on both initial and reply emails, files and images attached to incoming emails will be attached to the Slack messages arriving in the channel. Ask users to email you screenshots!

Reply with Files from Slack. Files and images go both ways: when you attach an image or file to your reply (in a Contact thread), it will be attached to the outgoing email.

Send Replies to Webhook. Intended as an advanced developer feature, you can integrate Contact for Slack into your own web or mobile app. By default, replies from Slack are sent out by email -- but with this feature, you can choose to send replies to a webhook URL of your choice, with the message sent in JSON format. More details found in the help docs, or contact me.

Terms

Contact for Slack is intended to be use for receiving and managing outside contact messages to your team, such as customer support or sales lead collection. Any other usage will be deemed a violation of these terms. Specifically, Contact for Slack should not be used as a replacement for your email inbox -- if you are interested in such solutions, Slack has a built-in feature for receiving emails in Slack, with more coming in future.

Privacy

The Contact app does not store any messages received or sent to or from your team. The app receives incoming messages and passes them on to your Slack and receives your replies from Slack and sends them on via email. Metadata about each thread and message are retained to ensure that conversations remain threaded and to provide other features. The app receives basic information about your team and channel, and that information is stored in order to save your settings, remember your current plan, and monthly usage stats.

Pricing

Contact Plans (USD per Slack Workspace)

FREE

$0/month

  • receive messages via email
  • receive messages via form
  • reply from Slack
  • single Contact channel
  • up to 10 new conversations per month

PRO

$10/month

  • everything in the Free plan, plus:
  • multiple Contact channels
  • receive email attachments in Slack
  • reply with files from Slack
  • up to 100 new conversations per month

PLUS

$50/month

  • everything in the Pro plan, plus:
  • automatic language translations
  • top priority for new feature requests
  • send Slack replies to webhook (developer)
  • up to 1,000 new conversations per month

Support

The contact form below is powered by Contact for Slack! Send a message, and I will receive it in Slack and reply to you from Slack!