Overview

After a Slack message becomes a conversation, it appears in the Featurebase Inbox with all your other customer conversations. Your team can manage support from one place, while public replies return to the connected Slack thread.

When the Slack sender matches an existing customer, their User and Company details, synced attributes, recent conversations, and other available context appear beside the thread. Your team can understand the customer's history, assign ownership, apply SLAs, use internal notes, and reply without chasing information across tools.

Featurebase keeps supported message content and actions connected across both products. It does not mirror every Slack or Inbox action. Internal notes, assignment, tags, priority, and SLA state remain private to your team.

How Slack users are identified

Featurebase resolves each Slack sender in this order:

1. A Featurebase teammate with a connected personal Slack account

2. A Featurebase teammate with the same email address

3. An existing or new customer with the same Slack email address

4. A Slack lead when Slack does not share an email address

This lets messages from the same identified customer stay attached to their customer record. Slack Connect members and other people whose email is unavailable appear as Slack leads instead of being matched by name.

A top-level message from a recognized Featurebase teammate does not create a customer conversation. Teammate replies inside an existing customer Slack thread can still synchronize with its conversation.

Connect your personal Slack account

Connect your own Slack account if you want Inbox replies to appear from your Slack profile.

To connect your personal Slack account:

1. Go to Settings → Integrations → Slack

2. Choose the relevant Slack workspace to manage

3. Open General

4. Under Reply as yourself, click Connect Slack account

5. Complete the Slack authorization

Connecting your personal account is optional for normal public replies:

• When your account is connected and Slack lets you post in the channel, the reply appears from your own Slack profile.

• Otherwise, Featurebase posts through the Featurebase app using your teammate name and profile picture.

• Automated replies use the workspace's configured bot profile.

See customer context while you reply

When Featurebase matches the Slack sender to an existing customer, the normal Inbox context appears beside the conversation. Depending on the customer data you have synced, this can include:

• User details and custom data attributes

• Company details and custom data attributes

• Recent conversations across your support Channels

• Linked feedback requests and recent page visits

• Qualification data and links to connected systems

This context stays in Featurebase and is not posted to the customer Slack thread. It helps your team understand the customer's history and account before replying, even when the current question started in Slack.

If Slack does not share the sender's email address, Featurebase creates a Slack lead instead. The Inbox shows the information available from Slack, but it cannot automatically attach existing customer history or synced attributes until the person is identified.

Reply from the Inbox

Open the Slack conversation in the Inbox, write a public reply, and send it as usual. Featurebase delivers the reply to the active Slack thread and records its delivery state on the Inbox message.

Use an internal note when the message is only for your team. Internal notes never post to the customer Slack thread.

If Slack rejects a public reply, Featurebase marks the message as failed and shows the delivery error. Common causes include a missing or locked thread, an archived channel, a disconnected workspace, or missing channel access. See Troubleshoot Slack support for the matching fix.

Work with grouped Slack messages

With ‘One-to-one mapping’, one Slack root message and its thread replies map to one conversation.

With ‘Smart AI-based ingestion’ or ‘Time-based grouping’, one conversation can contain several top-level Slack messages. Featurebase keeps a separate Slack thread mapping for each root message so replies from each Slack thread return to the correct conversation.

The active root is the most recently grouped top-level message or the grouped Slack thread with the latest incoming reply. A new public reply from the Inbox is posted to that active Slack thread.

If you need to confirm the exact Slack context before replying, open the relevant message in Slack.

Learn more about how Slack messages become conversations →

Use Inbox features

You can manage a Slack conversation with the core Inbox tools, including:

• Assignment to a teammate or team

• Priority

• Tags

• SLAs

• Internal notes and teammate mentions

• Tickets linked to the conversation

Assignment, priority, tags, SLAs, and notes remain internal to Featurebase. When you create a linked Ticket or change its status, Featurebase can post the Ticket update to the Slack thread. Public replies sent from the linked Ticket also return to Slack.

Slack conversations can also use Workflows for automation and Fibi AI Agent for AI-powered answers.

For private operational collaboration in Slack, see Discuss conversations with your team in Slack.

Close and reopen a conversation

Closing a Slack conversation marks the Inbox work as complete. It does not close, lock, or otherwise change the Slack thread.

The conversation reopens when:

• A customer or teammate sends a new human reply in a mapped Slack thread

• A teammate sends a new public reply from Featurebase

Messages posted by a Slack bot do not reopen a closed conversation.

Open the original message in Slack

Use ‘Open in Slack’ button when you need to inspect the original thread, see surrounding channel context, or continue working directly in Slack.

To open the original message in Slack:

1. Open the message menu for a synchronized Slack message in the conversation

2. Select Open in Slack

You can also click the Slack channel shown in the conversation details to open the channel.

FAQs