How the new Slack message buttons make Helpdesk 10x easier with Talkus

Today, Slack released their new message buttons and as everybody knows, a button is worth a thousand characters, hell yeah! In a nutshell, Slack now offers buttons right inside the chat windows, so that you can replace some commands (that’s certainly more user-friendly) — which also means richer integrations.

Here at Talkus, we’ve been lucky enough to get our hands on this awesome new feature before it was released in order to integrate it to our product. For those who don’t know us yet: our mission at Talkus is to provide the best Help Desk solution for SMBs, directly in your own Slack.

Since we are developing all features of a Help Desk inside Slack, we need to be pretty creative. Sometimes features come naturally (for instance: chat with your visitors), sometimes we deal with more complex use cases (like how to deal with a ticket inbox inside a Slack channel).

Thanks to the new “message buttons”, Slack offers us plenty of new ways to build features that let you interact with your users more easily and efficiently.

Here are 2 examples of new features we’ve developed in Talkus that use message buttons.

Use case 1: Trigger support actions right inside a Button bar

As of yesterday, when the support team using Talkus wanted to take action, they had to remember all Talkus commands and type them in the input bar. It works well for commands you often use and know by heart, but when that wasn’t the case, it could be a pretty frustrating experience.

Now, with the new buttons, the support team just needs to type .buttons (or .b for short) to pop up a list of actions. They click on the button they want and afterwards, the bar disappears and the action is executed. No need to remember all the commands name anymore!

Use case 2: Display Statistics and play with data easily

Your use of Talkus stats has also been improved by the new button feature. The command /talkus_stats is used to displays graphs and metrics about your Talkus usage.

Before the message buttons, we were limited to displaying only one set of data. Now, below the graphs, we’ve added some buttons that allow users to change the time period and the graph types. When you click on it, it directly updates the graphs with the new data. It couldn’t be easier!

Message buttons in Slack are definitely a game changer for us, for our users, and for all Slack users.

We can’t wait to see what other Slack integrations will do with buttons.

Have fun with Talkus and buttons!