Integrating Clarify/Dovetail with your group chat app
Here at Dovetail, we’ve evolved our use of group chat over the years. We used to use Campfire, then went to Hipchat, and now we use Slack.
Our dev and support teams are in Slack all day, and I find it much more enjoyable than email. I’ve noticed that the amount of email we deal with now is considerably less.
It’s integrated with Github, so we get notifications on Github issues and code commits.
And, of course, we post messages based on business rules from Clarify/Dovetail. For example, a message is auto-posted when a case is dispatched and when it is accepted.
As a group, we often discuss a case to help the case owner get it resolved. And this discussion happens in our group chat. Slack really is pretty awesome.
Regardless of which group communication tool you use, it’s typically pretty easy to integrate it with your CRM Support app. Below I’ll share how we’ve done a few of these integrations over the years.
Campfire
We’ve posted before about posting messages to Campfire using a ruby library.
Today, I would simply use curl to call the campfire web service. Here’s my script for posting a message to Campfire.
HipChat
A similar script for posting a message to Hipchat.
Slack
And now that we use Slack, here’s my script for posting a message there.
Common
If you look at all of those script, they’re all pretty similar, and they all use curl to call a webservice. Really pretty simple stuff.
Business Rule
To get the script to fire, all we need is a simple business rule
Object Type: Case
Rule Name/Description: Slack notification
Start Event: Dispatch
Cancel Events:
Conditions: none
Action Title: Post to Slack
Action Type: Command Line
Start Action: 0 minutes
From: Event Creation
Using: Elapsed Time
Repeat: Never
Message:
C:\Dovetail\RuleManagerActions\slack\slack-message.bat “[Object Type] [Object ID] has been dispatched to the [Current Queue] queue: http://dovetailsoftware.com/agent5/support/cases/[Object ID]” #supportChannel
Summary
I love showing how easy it is to integrate contemporary systems together. Even though Clarify may not be considered “contemporary”, I still find it pretty easy to integrate it with whatever I want.
Hope you find this useful.
Rock on.
