Building a Real-Time Slack Case
Triage System with Salesforce
How we replaced ignored Slack notifications with rich case cards, threaded timelines, and live updates—turning a channel nobody watched into the team's primary triage surface.
Key Outcomes
Case visibility in Slack
Manual case announcements
Reopened cases surfaced
Our Role
Technical Architecture & Development
Technology Stack
The Problem
The support team lived in Slack. Their cases lived in Salesforce.
That gap created friction everywhere. New cases were easy to miss. Customer replies stayed buried in the CRM until someone refreshed. Agents had to announce ownership manually in Slack, then disappear back into Salesforce to do the real work.
Over time, the Slack channel trained people to ignore it. Notifications came through, but they rarely contained enough context to act on quickly. The result wasn't slow agents—it was slow visibility.
No Context
Notifications showed a case number—nothing actionable without clicking through to Salesforce.
Buried Replies
Customer emails stayed in Salesforce. No visibility in Slack until someone went hunting.
Silent Reopens
When customers replied to old threads, nothing happened in Slack. Cases fell through.
What We Built
We built a real-time Slack Case Triage system that turns Salesforce Cases into first-class Slack objects. Each case becomes a rich card posted to a shared channel, with a threaded timeline that captures the full lifecycle.
Notifications with just case numbers
Click through for any context
Channel ignored as noise
Emails buried in CRM
Reopens via old threads? Silent.
Rich case cards with full context
Live updates to existing messages
Channel becomes primary triage surface
📥 / 📤 emails in threaded timeline
Reopened cases broadcast to channel
Rich Case Cards
When a case is created, a structured card appears in Slack immediately. Subject links to Salesforce, ownership, status, and account context visible at a glance.
Live Updates
Status or owner changes update the same message—no flood of duplicates. Customer and agent emails appear as thread replies in the case timeline.
Auto Knowledge Suggestions
Relevant knowledge articles are suggested automatically in the thread—while the case context is still fresh and agents are actively triaging.
The Differentiator: Smarter Reopen Behavior
While building this system, we uncovered a subtle but costly workflow issue. A legacy rule automatically reopened any closed case when a customer replied—even if the case had been closed weeks or months earlier.
We replaced that behavior with a simple, human rule: if a customer replies within 3 days of closure, reopen the original case. If they reply after 3 days, create a new follow-up case, link it to the original, and route it properly.
→ We documented this logic in detail separately
Under the Hood: The Architecture
The system is bidirectional, but Salesforce remains the system of record.
System Architecture Overview
Callback Loop
Slack message updates require a timestamp. Salesforce posts → Slack returns the ts → SF stores it for future updates. This enables true "live updates" vs. duplicate messages.
Intelligent Filtering
Salesforce determines whether a change matters (status, owner, key fields) before firing events—so Slack only gets meaningful updates, not noise.
The Results
The Slack channel went from "muted by everyone" to the team's primary triage surface.
Case visibility in Slack
Manual announcements
Reopened cases surfaced
Why This Matters
The team stopped ignoring the channel because the channel stopped wasting their time. Notifications with context meant faster response. Threaded timelines meant less "what's the status?" back-and-forth. And surfacing reopened cases meant customers who replied to old threads actually got help—instead of waiting until someone stumbled on the update in Salesforce.
Final Thought
If you've ever watched a support team lose time to "where is the update?" this kind of integration doesn't just save minutes. It reduces the number of times work gets dropped.
By making the CRM visible where people already work, we turned case management from a pull-based workflow into a push-based system.