Rotation mentions
Mentions are way for users in you Slack Workspace to ask rotation users on duty to intervene in support.
This feature is especially useful in domains where Round Robin cannot manipulate the users groups with the "on-duty user group" feature due to security reasons.
Create a mention
To create a mention, you first need to give a rotation a code. Without a code, it will not be possible to indicate Round Robin what rotation you're looking for.
To do this, just add a code in the Rotation Edit (or Create) window.
Once you have a rotation with a code, just tell your users to go a in channel where Round Robin is present, and say "@Round Robin code" - in this case, @Round Robin multi.
Question: Why not using something Slack can suggest, like when you do @user or @group?
Answer: Slack doesn't allow you to created "taggable" things. You cannot inject your own tags in the system.
Mention flow
Now, there are a certain number of possibilities around what can happen, based on how mentions are configured in the rotation. For details, check the Options section.
On the receiving side the user on duty should receive a request for help. The user can ACK or PASS.
ACK will inform the user who made the request that their request got acknowledged by someone and this will establish contact.
If the user cannot ack, he should PASS to let the system decide on what to do next: ask another user on duty, or pass on the mention and inform the calling user that no one can answer their request.
If no user is on duty, or the rotation is offline, the user will immediately receive a response, and the mention flow will close.
Mention options
You can configure a number of options while using mentions. Some are limited to PRO accounts.
Expiration (absolute)
The absolute expiration controls how long a mention should be open and for how long Round Robin should try to contact the users on duty for a certain rotation. By default is 60 minutes. If a mention isn't acknowleged by that time, the mention will expire and close automatically.
Ask users to acknowledge or notify again
This is a PRO feature. By default, the mention is a one-shot event: Round Robin will ask all users on duty to answer the mention and it will keep the mention open by the amount of time defined by the Absolute Expiration value.
If you enable this options, Round Robin will notify again the users on duty after X minutes (X you can define in the options) that a mention is pending for them.
Round robin mentions
This is a PRO feature. If you have more than one user on duty for the same rotation, it could be of interest for you to not notify all users all the time when a mention is created.
Enabling this feature will have two effects, on the same mention and on subsequent mentions.
Imagine you have a rotation with 3 users on duty: Robert, John, and Jack.
- A mention is created and Robert is notified.
- Robert ACK the mention -> End
- Robert PASS on the mention -> John is notified and ACK the mention.
- A new mention is created; then Jack is notified.
This option works also with the previous "Ask users to acknowledge or notify again". Quoting the previous example, if instead of PASS Robert doesn't do anything for X minutes, John will be notified then instead of him again.
Question: Wow, cool feature! Can I have it in user groups, too?
Answer: Nope. Unfortunately Slack doesn't allow "bots" to be member of users groups. Only users. This means we cannot intercept when a user call the @group-handle in the channel.