One of my favourite things to work with are Slack bots! For those of you that don’t use Slack, it’s a messaging app built primarily for teams, it’s growing in popularity and is used pretty heavily among remote teams. It’s built in a way that you can have different channels, channels can be different departments or projects and you can have different people in different channels.
Slack is very tech focused and has an extensive API which is really fun to use. On top of this they also have Slack apps or Slack bots and these bots can be added into any channel like a normal person would be, they can listen in for messages and they can send messages via an API call. We use these a lot in our business for tracking various things, if you need data fast it’s like messaging someone and them replying instantly, as opposed to trying to open a huge excel file to find the number you want.
A few interesting use cases we’ve helped people set up Slack bots for would be:
If you’re running an e-commerce store well here’s a slack notification for a new order along with the items inside of the order and a link to view it in Shopify. We’ve even set these up for add to carts and also initialised checkouts, they’re really fun and satisfying to watch.
We recently setup a Slack bot that alerts a team when a new user has installed their Shopify app, we also set up a notification on uninstall so they can monitor what is going on.
You can also set up certain commands like we have, we have one for accounting where you can say /weekrev and it will show you a breakdown of this weeks revenue which is in real time.
The possibilities are endless with bots and they are really fun to setup. If you’re missing crucial events or need to be alerted that something is happening then I’d suggest setting them up.