Set Up a Slack Autoresponder
Knowledge management can be one of the biggest challenges a lot of companies face today. There can be a lot of important information that is scattered in different sources which makes it difficult to find anything. Sometimes there can be many repetitive questions you constantly have to answer over and over again which can be very tiring and time-consuming. To stop wasting time on answering the common questions, you can automate this process with OneBar. OneBar will help you simplify arranging information and answering the repetitive questions using your personal Knowledge Base and Slack Autoresponder.
You can say: Slack has a built-in @slackbot, why should I use OneBar? Sure, you can configure @slackbot to reply to simple messages like “What’s our wifi password?” or “How to order food?” automatically. It’s easy and straightforward to use, but the functionality is pretty basic. You have to define all possible variants of the question explicitly (e.g., “What is X?”, “What’s X?”, “What does X do?, etc.”). Moreover, it will have the same behavior for all channels.
Using OneBar, you will be able to break free from the @slackbot limitations, and set up advanced Autoresponders for all of your channels. Moreover, the bot will allow you to answer even more complicated questions automatically. Below you’ll find everything that you’ll need to know to configure OneBar for your workspace.
Create a Knowledge Base
Let’s assume that you manage the #hr channel in your company — a place where employees ask all kinds of HR-related questions. A lot of them are simple things like “What’s our wifi password?”, “How to order lunch?” or “How many paid days off do I have per year?”. Some are more complicated than the others, but it would be great to have a bot that could resolve most of them automatically. To use OneBar for this purpose, add the questions you need it to answer into your Knowledge Base and tag them to make searching for answers more convenient.
With OneBar you can add questions into the Knowledge Base right from the Slack channel. To do so, you need to add the OneBar bot into the channel, and after that scan the channel in the web application.
Scanning the channel will allow you to detect the questions the bot hasn’t found the answer to yet, and to add them into your knowledge base. To add a question into the knowledge base you can click the Add Answer button or just drag the suggestion from the left column into the Knowledge base on the right. After that you will be able to add an answer to the question and save it into your Knowledge Base.
Configure OneBar bot
Once you get data in your knowledge base it is possible to set up the Slack Autoresponder in the channel settings section. To enter the Channel Settings you can choose the necessary channel in the Slack Integrations section and click the Settings button.
Here it is possible to change the bot’s name and add a picture that will suit your company’s style, set up notifications and subscriptions, and set the bot verbosity level.
There are 5 levels of bot verbosity you can choose from:
- Silent — the bot never responds to anything automatically
- High Certainty — the bot will only reply automatically if it has a very good match for the question (e.g., an exact match in the question title)
- Medium Certainty — the bot will respond if it has a rather OK match, even though it may be wrong
- Medium + All Questions — same as Medium, but if there was no good match found and the message looks like a question, the bot will suggest to post it on OneBar
- Always Reply — the bot will reply to every message on the channel. This option is useful when you want to create a shared “OneBar” channel. People would come to such a channel only to talk to the OneBar bot without explicitly mentioning it in every message.
After you’ve configured the autoreply behavior, you can start asking questions on your channel, and the bot will begin responding to them automatically.
You can also limit the bot’s automatic answers to certain tags by adding them in the Scope section. This way the bot will look only for answers marked with these tags.
Additionally, you can subscribe the channel to a tag (or several tags), so when someone posts a new question marked with this tag on OneBar, the channel will automatically receive a notification.
Search answers from OneBar in DM
Unfortunately, due to security reasons, it is not possible to use Slack autoresponder in private channels and direct messages. But there is a way you can use OneBar there – using a Slack Shortcut.
Even though it's not entirely automatic, it can often come in handy: use /onebar command to bring up frequent responses when answering someone's question in Direct Messages.
