Create Slack Notifications for CRM API Alerts

Chili Piper Admins are used to receiving CRM API alerts via email - the one that have "Failed to Execute CRM Action" in their subjects. 

Sometimes, these emails may get lost in the inbox, or global integration users would probably like more people within their company to receive these errors - like a CRM admin or a backup if the integration user is OOO, for example.

Slack notifications in a channel might be a good solution for these scenarios, so we will cover how to build them in this article.

Create a channel in Slack

The first step is to create a channel in your organization's Slack to start receiving these alerts. If you want to forward the alerts to an existing channel, skip to the next step/section: Create a Workflow in your Channel

Right next to "Channels," "Create," and finally, "Create channel":

Next, you will be able to name your channel, add a description, and select if it should be private or not:

Once you're done, hit "Create," and you'll be able to start adding the required people to the channel, or "Skip for now" and do it later:

Create a Workflow in your Channel

The next step would be adding a workflow to the channel you recently created or want to use.

Click the arrow right next to the channel's name, then "Integrations," "Send Emails to this channel," and finally, "Get Email Address":

Once you have a pop-up with the mail details, copy and save it, as we will use them in the next steps. If the channel is active, you can follow the same steps multiple times to copy the mail address once you need it.

Test the Mail Integration

We can test if the mail integration worked before moving to the next steps. Open your email provider (GCal, Office 365), pick one email alert - or any random email - and forward it to the mail address you copied from step 2:

If it worked, the email should pop up in the channel, like the example below:

Setup a rule in your mail provider to auto-forward the alerts

The mail alerts should contain the following subject, based on the CRM you have integrated with Chili Piper (Salesforce or HubSpot):

• Failed to Execute CRM Action

Let's create a rule to forward these emails to the Slack channel that was previously created automatically.

Gmail

Click the "Show search options" icon in Google Calendar's search box. Type "noreply@chilipiper.com" in the From field and the subject provided above in the Has the Words field, then hit "Create Filter":

Click the "Add Forwarding Address" button right next to "Forward it":

Click "Add a forwarding address" again, including the mail address we saved in step 2, and follow the steps:

A mail confirmation with a confirmation link will be sent to the channel. Copy/paste the link in your browser to confirm, and that should do it.

Office 365

In Outlook, click Settings  > Mail > Rules. Now, we are going to click "Add New Rule" and:

1. Create a name for your rule.
2. Add the following conditions:
   
   From: noreply@chilipiper.com
   Subject Includes: Failed to Execute CRM Action
   
   
3. Add "Forward To" as an action, and paste the Slack mail address you have from step 2.
4. Click Save.

Here's what it should look like: