Turn detractors into a Slack alert in ten minutes

To send detractors to Slack, connect Slack once in Settings, add an alert rule that matches the detractor bucket, pick a channel and press Send test. If your survey is already running, this takes about ten minutes.

Someone on your team should see an unhappy customer's answer, with the comment, the same day. It is one way to spot customer churn risk early.

Why the speed matters

A detractor answers 0 to 6 on the 0 to 10 question. ¹ Many have a reason you can fix, and most never tell you unless asked. Your survey was the one time they did.

Bain's article on assessing a Net Promoter system has a section on closing the loop and tracks how often companies call detractors within 48 hours. ² You do not need a phone call for every answer. You do need to know the answer exists. An alert is a message in a channel your team already reads.

What you need

• A Pulseri account with a running NPS campaign.
• A Slack workspace where you can add apps.
• A Pulseri role that can manage integrations, such as Administrator. Alert rules have their own permissions.
• A Slack channel for the alerts, such as #customer-alerts.

Your plan limits how many alert rules you can create. The pricing page shows each plan's limit. One rule is enough for this guide.

Step 1: Connect Slack, once

In Pulseri, open Settings, then Integrations. Find Slack, press Connect and approve Pulseri for your workspace.

You do this once. You do not paste a webhook address into each rule. Pulseri uses the connection to read the channel list and post messages.

• Pulseri can post to public channels without an invitation.
• For a private channel, first add the Pulseri app to the channel in Slack. Until then the channel shows "needs setup" in the list.

Step 2: Open Alert rules

Open Settings, then Alert rules. Press Add alert rule.

Step 3: Name the rule and pick the campaign

In Name, write something you will recognize in a list, such as "Slack: NPS detractors".

In Campaign, choose your NPS campaign. Score and bucket rules need a specific campaign, because a 6 means different things on different scales. Leave it empty only for a rule that checks sentiment, which then applies to every campaign.

Step 4: Build the condition

The Condition box is a small rule builder. You can check three things:

• Bucket, the group the score falls in: detractor, passive or promoter.
• Score, the number itself.
• Sentiment, positive, neutral or negative, based on the comment.

For this guide, choose Bucket, is, Detractor.

Combine conditions with "all of" or "any of". Three rules teams like:

1. Detractors only. Bucket is Detractor.
2. Very unhappy. Score is 3 or lower. Use this when volume is high and you want only the worst answers.
3. Unhappy and angry. Bucket is Detractor, or sentiment is Negative. Use "any of" to catch a 7 with an angry comment.

Sentiment is filled in shortly after the answer arrives, so a sentiment alert can come slightly later than a score alert.

Step 5: Choose Slack and the channel

In Channel, choose Slack. A second field lists your workspace's channels. Pick yours.

If the channel list does not load, you see an error with a way to retry. Pulseri does not guess a channel, which protects you from alerts that go nowhere.

Press Create.

Step 6: Send a test

Find the rule in the list, open its menu and press Send test. A test message arrives in your Slack channel within seconds.

Check that it arrived in the right channel, that you can read the score and the person, and that the link opens the campaign. If the test fails, the rule tells you why. The usual causes are a private channel the app has not joined and a deleted channel.

What an alert looks like

The Slack message shows the score, the campaign's metric, the person and, if they wrote one, the full comment. It links to the campaign page, where you see the answer in context.

A made-up example:

NPS: 3 from Priya Nair, Brightleaf "Setup took us two weeks and nobody answered my emails."

The comment is never cut short, so you do not need a second click to read the reason.

Keep the channel useful

• Start narrow. Detractors with a comment are a better first rule than every answer.
• Name an owner. A channel everyone watches can mean nobody acts. Pin a note such as "Support lead replies within one working day".
• Add a thank-you rule later. A second rule for promoters lets the team say thank you. Use a different channel so the first stays quiet.
• Review each quarter. Remove or tighten any alert nobody acts on.

How Pulseri keeps it reliable

• One alert per answer. A rule alerts at most once for each answer, even if it matches twice.
• No flood on day one. A new rule does not look at old answers.
• A delivery record. Each rule keeps its recent deliveries and shows whether each one is pending, delivered or failed, with the number of attempts and the last error.
• Retries. If Slack is busy or briefly down, Pulseri tries again, up to five attempts over about 20 minutes. If Slack rejects the message for good, for example because the channel was removed, the failure shows up right away.

One limit: if someone edits their answer in the 24 hours after sending it, the rule does not look at the new score.

Other places to send it

A rule can also post to Microsoft Teams, send an email to one address or call your own system with a signed message. The alerts and automations page covers all four. If your detractors come from support tickets, pair this with the Zendesk CSAT guide.

Where Pulseri fits

When a score is low, Pulseri tells the right channel while the customer still remembers the experience. Ten minutes of setup is a small price for never finding out a month late.