This article is part of a series on Automations:

Slack is central for communication within many organizations. For example, you may want to use Slack to inform your team of a new End User NPS rating, a Company completing Onboarding, or various other events.

In Planhat, you can accomplish this by using Automations to post messages to Slack channels - both via Templated Automations and Custom Automations - and we'll describe how later in this article. Note that you need to connect your Slack to your Planhat tenant via our Slack integration before you can send messages to it via Automations.

Within these Slack messages you can use dynamic replacement codes, which means the exact message can be filled in with different data each time it's posted - so e.g. it could say "Kerry Quegan from Pfizer just gave a score of 10", and then "Arnold Rayner from Spotify just gave a score of 7", both from the same Automation.

You can also use formatting within these Slack messages - so the message in Slack could have bold text, text in italics, include links, and so on. In this article, we will show you how you can achieve this.

If you have connected up the Slack integration, one of the ways you can use this is by posting team notifications to your choice of Slack channel via Automations.

There are two main ways you can do this:

In the screenshots above, the text inside << >> brackets are replacement codes, which you can learn all about in our separate article here. They will be filled in with the appropriate data each time the message is posted to Slack. For example, the message in the Custom Automation shown in the screenshot immediately above posts to a specified Slack channel like this (in our demo environment testing):

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Although the example above shows a plain text Slack message (i.e. no formatting), it's easy to include formatting (bold text and links etc.) to your Slack messages, which we'll show you in this article. For example:

Sending these team notifications via Automations to public Slack channels is a fantastic way to automatically keep the relevant people up to date with important customer/prospect news, so key events are not missed.

There are a wide variety of possible use cases, such as:

... and many more!

Then in terms of why to format your Automation Slack messages:

To send a Slack message via a Templated Automation, go to the Apps Library, search for "Slack" to see the options, click on your Template of choice, and then use the boxes to configure it as desired, including choosing the Slack channel to post to, and customizing the message if required.

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To send a Slack message via a Custom Automation, click "+ Custom Automation" within the Apps Library, configure your Automation trigger, and then select "Send Slack message" as the step type at the appropriate position within your sequence of steps. Choose the Slack channel you'd like to post the message to, and write your desired message (using replacement codes) in the box provided in the step configuration panel.

It's easy to format text in these Slack messages. Here we'll show you how. The first screenshot in each case shows the text in the "Message" box in a (Custom) Automation, and the second screenshot shows the corresponding message sent to Slack (using our testing setup).

Bold text is perfect for highlighting key parts of a Slack message.

In the Automation message, use asterisks (*) around the text you want to be bold.

Having your text in italics is another great method for highlighting your choice of text in a Slack message.

In the Automation message, use underscores (_) around the text you want to be in italics.

Inline text (also known as code font) is another way you can highlight specific text, making it stand out within your Slack message.

In the Automation message, use backticks (`) around the text you want to be inline/code.

This is less commonly used in Automation messages, but if you'd like some of your Slack message to be crossed out, you can achieve this by using the strikethrough formatting option.

In the Automation message, using tildes (~) around the text you want to strike out.

If you would like to include a link in your Slack message, you might want the reader to be able to click on a word or phrase of your choice rather than the whole URL being shown in the Slack message.

To do this, in your Automation, you will need to format your message with some basic HTML:

<a href="YOUR URL HERE">WORD OR PHRASE TO CLICK</a>

- see the screenshots below for an example to make it clearer.

Sometimes you'll want to @mention a specific user in Slack, to ensure the message - although visible to other team members - is brought to the attention to the person responsible, so they definitely don't miss it among the "noise" of lots of Slack activity. For example, you might have a Slack message posting NPS survey responses to an #nps channel for all to see, but then tag in the Customer Success Manager responsible for the Company of the End User who gave that rating.

You can @mention people in your Automation Slack message as long as their Slack ID is populated on their User record in Planhat.

"SlackId" is a system (default/standard) field on the User model (User representing you and your colleagues, as opposed to users of your product, which are represented by the End User model).

The quick way of populating Slack IDs for your Users in Slack is to go to the Slack integration (in the App Center) and clicking "Sync users".

You could also add the Slack IDs manually if you prefer:

Now the required Slack IDs are populated in Planhat, you can build the Custom Automation.

In this example, we want to create an Automation where when a Company is created, we post to Slack and tag in the Owner of the Company. Our overall Automation looks like this:

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Our trigger is "Company is created with anything", as shown in the configuration panel in the screenshot above, because we want this Automation to be triggered every time a Company record is created.

Our first step is then a "Get" step, which you can read all about in our separate article here. It looks like this:

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This step is to "Get" the full details of the User (of Planhat, i.e. you and your colleagues) that's referenced in the Owner field on the Company record that triggered the Automation. We use the replacement code <<object.owner>> to say we want to look at the trigger record (the "object" - the Company, e.g. Ford) and specifically the "owner" field on it. Once we have "Got" the User record of the Company Owner (e.g. Antonio Abram), we can see its SlackId field, and reference it in the Slack message.

Also note that we have renamed this step from the automatically generated random code name to "Step 1" for clarity.

Finally, we have the Slack message step:

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In this example, the Slack message we type is:

Company "<<object.name>>" was just created. <@<<Step 1.slackId>>>, can you please contact them within the next 7 days?

We use a couple of replacement codes here:

The message posted to Slack looks like this:

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