How to track customer requests in Slack

Nobody decides one morning that they need a tracker. It creeps up. A manager asks how many customer requests are open right now, and nobody can say. A customer forwards a message from last Tuesday that never got an answer. Someone starts keeping a list of "things to follow up on" in their own DMs, and it works until they go on holiday.

If your team supports customers in shared Slack channels, this post covers what tracking requests actually involves, the options for doing it, and what to record from the first day.

Signs you've outgrown watching channels

• You can't answer "how many requests are open?" without scrolling through every channel.
• Requests get answered twice, or not at all, because nobody knows who has them.
• You find out about missed messages from the customer.
• Answering "how fast do we respond?" means a weekend with a spreadsheet.
• People keep their own reminders, and the team's queue lives in a dozen private places.

A common report from teams in this position is that it starts somewhere past fifteen customer channels. By the time you're past fifty, watching channels stops working entirely.

What "tracked" means

A request is tracked when it has five things, and when anyone on the team can see them:

1. A record. The request exists somewhere outside the scrollback, with a link to the original message.
2. An owner. One named person, or a visible "no owner".
3. A status. Is it waiting on us, waiting on the customer, snoozed until later, or closed?
4. A clock. How long since the customer asked, and how long until the target.
5. A history. Who replied, who it was handed to, and when it closed.

The status is the part teams most often skip, and it matters most. "Open" isn't enough. A request where you've asked the customer for logs is very different from one where the customer is waiting on you, and only the second one should be on fire.

Option 1: a shared list

The simplest tracker is a spreadsheet or a list in your project tool. When a request comes in, someone adds a row: account, link, owner, status, date. When it closes, someone updates it.

It costs nothing and makes the queue visible. It also depends entirely on people remembering to update it, in the middle of answering the customer. Status goes stale within days, and nobody trusts a list that is wrong half the time.

Option 2: reminders and saved messages

Slack's reminders and saved items help one person keep track of what they owe. They don't show the team anything. They're personal, and nobody else can see them or pick up the work when that person is out. People who rely on manual reminders for customer channels tend to say the same thing: it doesn't scale.

Option 3: copy requests into a help desk

You can connect a help desk and create a ticket for each request. This gives you real tracking, at the cost of a second place to work and a sync that has to keep a Slack thread and a ticket in step. We weigh this up in Slack vs help desk for B2B support.

Option 4: track in Slack, automatically

The last option is a tool that watches your customer channels and tracks requests for you, without moving the conversation. If you go this way, check for these:

• Customers change nothing. They keep posting where they post today.
• Every new customer message is caught. No keyword lists, no requirement that the customer tags anyone.
• Not every message becomes a ticket. Your team can mark a message as not a request, and track one that was missed.
• Status follows the conversation. Who spoke last should move the status without anyone clicking.
• Edits and deletes are handled. The stored copy should match what's in Slack.
• Your team discusses requests out of the customer's sight.
• It works at fifty channels, not just at five.

What to record from day one

Whatever you choose, start recording these now, even by hand. They're what you'll want for every report later: the account, the time of the first customer message, the time of the first reply from your team, the owner, the time it closed, and whether it went over target.

With those six fields you can answer most of the questions a manager will ask, and see which accounts take most of your team's time.

How Thorpe handles it

Thorpe is option 4. You add it to your customer channels and pick a triage channel; the getting started guide has the steps. From then on:

• A top-level message from someone on the customer's side opens a request, and a card appears in your triage channel. Thread replies attach to the same request.
• Your team can fix what Thorpe got wrong from Slack's message menu: Track as request, Not a request, and Merge into request.
• Status follows who spoke last. A teammate's reply moves the request to waiting on the customer, and Thorpe marks your team's first reply with 👀. A customer reply moves it back. A request left waiting on the customer for 72 hours closes, and a new customer reply reopens it.
• Edits and deletes in Slack update Thorpe's copy.
• Each request has an owner, a priority, both SLA clocks and an activity history. Replies in the card's thread are internal notes.
• A web tracker lists every request across all your channels, with filters and search, and each request opens to its thread, clocks and timeline. Replies stay in Slack.
• If a customer disconnects a shared channel, Thorpe notes it on each open request and pauses the resolution clock.
• Thorpe tells the triage channel when someone from a customer's side joins or leaves their channel.

AI is optional. With it turned on in Settings (Smarter request detection), it reads each new request, gives it a title and a priority, and marks the ones it isn't sure are real requests as "needs review", so a teammate can check them. It never dismisses a message on its own, and if the model fails or times out, the request stays open and is marked for review. Without AI, every top-level customer message opens a request and nothing is sent to a model. Grouping several quick messages from one customer into one request is off for now. Thorpe asks for bot scopes only. It stores messages only from the channels you mark as customer channels, plus direct messages sent to Thorpe when private requests are turned on. The privacy and security page has the detail.