Connecting
Go to Settings → Connections, add a connection and pick Slack. Continuing takes you to Slack, where you choose the workspace and approve the permissions — Zudo never asks you for a token. Slack sends you back and the connection appears with your channel list already loaded. Start and finish in the same browser. The link Zudo hands Slack is good for ten minutes and is tied to the person and organization who started it, so a link that has sat in a tab overnight, or one opened in a different organization, is refused and you start again from Connections. Adding an app to a Slack workspace may need an admin, depending on how that workspace is set up. If yours does, Slack takes a request rather than installing — an admin approves it, and then you come back to Zudo and start again. Slack does not tell Zudo that a request was made, so nothing appears on the Connections page in the meantime. Only an owner or admin of your Zudo organization can connect Slack.What Zudo asks for, and why
Reading is per channel and off until you turn it on. Zudo reads the history of a channel you have linked to an account, and no other channel in the workspace.
Slack’s own permission is broader than that, and the approval screen says so: it covers the channels the app is in, because Slack has no way to grant history for one channel and not another. The narrowing is Zudo’s — it asks Slack only for channels somebody has linked. Two things follow, and both are worth knowing before you approve it:
- Zudo can only read a channel it has been added to, whatever the approval screen allowed. A public channel nobody invited it to is listed but cannot be linked; a private one is not even listed. Inviting the app to a channel is the act that grants access to it, and it happens in Slack, one channel at a time.
- Removing the app from a channel is the hard stop. Unlinking tells Zudo not to read it; being removed in Slack means it cannot.
Reading was added after the first version of this connection, and a Slack token never gains permissions it was not
issued with. If you connected Slack before, the shared channels panel asks you to Reconnect — one trip through
Slack, and your channels, playbook steps and messages are all kept.
Posting from a playbook
Add a Post to Slack step to a playbook. It has two parts: where it goes, and what it says.Where it goes
What it says
The message is a list of blocks you stack in order:
Every text field takes inserted values: type
{{ and pick one, and it is filled in per account when the step runs.
Values are read at the moment the step posts. A step that waits two weeks before posting sends the MRR as it is two
weeks from now, not as it was when the account enrolled.
Reading shared channels
A shared channel — Slack Connect — is a channel your workspace and a customer’s are both in. Zudo can read the ones you choose and keep them on the account.Linking a channel
Open Settings → Connections → Slack. Under Shared channels are the Slack Connect channels in your workspace, each with an account to link it to. Pick the account the channel is with, and reading starts. Zudo has to be in the channel, because Slack only lets an app read channels it has been added to. Type/invite @Zudo in the channel in Slack. Which comes first depends on whether the channel is private, and most Slack Connect channels are:
So an empty list, or a list missing the channel you are looking for, usually means a private channel nobody has invited Zudo to yet — not that Zudo cannot see your workspace.
Only shared channels are listed. An internal channel is a conversation between colleagues, and this is for conversations with customers.
The link is the mapping, and it is yours to make. Slack hides the email addresses of people in a connected workspace, so Zudo cannot match them to contacts the way it does with email — and a guessed link would put one customer’s conversation on another customer’s record.
Unlinking a channel stops the reading. The messages already read stay on the account; remove them by deleting the thread.
What you get once a channel is linked
- The channel on the account timeline, as a conversation, in order with everything else, with a link that opens the exact message in Slack — and each message in the conversation links to its own, with a thread reply opening its thread
- An unreplied flag when the customer spoke last and nobody has answered, on the same thresholds as email, and in the daily follow-up digest
- Tasks off a message, the same as any other conversation
- The channel in AI summaries, meeting prep and account search
Renaming, archiving, leaving
Testing it
The Slack connection has a Send a test message button, which posts to a channel you pick. That is the way to check a workspace is working without switching a playbook on and waiting for a check. The connection also has a Refresh channels button. Zudo re-reads your channel list once an hour on its own, so a channel created later — or one Zudo has just been invited to — appears within the hour; the button is for when you do not want to wait. Archived channels are left out.What happens when something goes wrong
A step that cannot post says why on its own counter in the playbook, and the reason is in the run’s log under Accounts.What is not here yet
- Health tier drops, completed requests and alerts do not post to Slack on their own. Slack is a playbook destination, so anything that reaches it does so because a playbook sends it
- Zudo does not reply in Slack, and there is no Zudo app to use inside Slack. Replying to a shared channel happens in Slack
- Reading is shared channels only. An internal channel cannot be linked to an account
- A reply to a thread Zudo read days ago is picked up on a sweep, which re-reads the last week of a channel once an hour. So a late reply shows up within the hour rather than within five minutes
- Files, images and reactions are not read. A message that is only an upload comes through as the text next to it, if there was any
- One workspace per organization. Connecting a second Slack replaces nothing, but the Add Connection screen offers Slack only while none is connected