If your team lives in a chat tool, you shouldn’t have to keep the inbox open to notice a waiting customer. IsTyping can post a short alert to a Slack, Microsoft Teams or Discord channel when someone needs you — with a button that opens the conversation. You still reply in the inbox, as usual; the alert only tells you where to look.
Everything here happens in Settings → Team chat alerts. You need to be an owner or admin of the website, and the feature has to be part of your plan (the page tells you when it isn’t).
How it works
Each tool gives you an incoming-webhook URL: a private address that posts into one channel. You paste that URL into IsTyping once, choose which alerts the channel should get, and that’s it. You can connect up to five channels — for example one for the support team and one for the people who look after your status page.
Treat the webhook URL like a password. Anyone who has it can post into your channel. IsTyping stores it encrypted and never shows it again; the settings page only shows its start and its last four characters. When you add a connection or replace its URL, we ask you to confirm it’s you. API tokens can’t read or change these settings.
Get the URL from your chat tool
Slack
- Go to api.slack.com/apps and click Create New App → From scratch. Give it a name (for example “IsTyping alerts”) and pick your workspace.
- Open Incoming Webhooks, switch it on and click Add New Webhook to Workspace.
- Choose the channel, click Allow, and copy the webhook URL. It starts with
https://hooks.slack.com/services/.
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft has replaced the old “Incoming Webhook” connector with Workflows. Use a workflow:
- In Teams, go to the channel, open its ⋯ menu and choose Workflows.
- Pick the template Send webhook alerts to a channel, choose the team and channel, and save.
- Copy the webhook URL the workflow shows you. It usually contains
logic.azure.comorpowerplatform.comand ends in…/triggers/manual/paths/invoke?…. Teams shows it only once, so paste it straight into IsTyping.
If Teams asks who may trigger the workflow, choose Anyone: IsTyping does not sign in to your organisation, so the other options make every alert fail. The workflow belongs to the person who created it — if they leave, add a co-owner so the alerts keep coming.
Discord
- Open Server Settings → Integrations → Webhooks (you need the “Manage Webhooks” permission).
- Click New Webhook, give it a name and choose the channel.
- Click Copy Webhook URL. It starts with
https://discord.com/api/webhooks/.
Then, in Settings → Team chat alerts, click Add Slack, Add Microsoft Teams or Add Discord, paste the URL, choose your alerts and click Save. Use Send test alert to check that it arrives — if it doesn’t, the page shows what the chat tool answered.
The alerts
Each one can be switched on or off per connection. All are on when you add a connection.
- New conversation waiting. A visitor started a chat and it needs a person. While a chatbot or the AI answer bot is handling the chat you get nothing; when the bot hands the chat to your team, you get the alert then. We wait a few seconds first, so if someone on your team answers straight away, no alert goes out.
- No reply yet. A customer wrote and nobody answered within the minutes you choose (5 by default, 1 to 60). You get one reminder per wait: it is cancelled as soon as someone replies or resolves the conversation, and the next reminder only comes after the customer writes again.
- New email conversation. An email arrived that starts a new conversation.
- Message while you were away. A visitor wrote while nobody on your team was online, or outside your opening hours. Once per wait. On a connection with this alert on, it takes the place of “New conversation waiting” for chats that start while you are away.
- Low rating. A visitor rated a conversation at or below the number of stars you choose (2 by default).
- Status monitor down or recovered. One of your status-page monitors went down or came back. Needs the status page in your plan.
You never get alerts about your team’s own messages, private notes, blocked visitors, or while your website is suspended.
When a lot happens at once
A channel gets at most 30 alerts a minute. If more come in — say, a sudden rush of chats — the rest are folded into one message such as “…and 12 more conversations waiting”, so your channel stays readable.
When something goes wrong
If the chat tool is briefly unavailable, we try again for up to an hour, then give up on that alert. If the tool says the webhook no longer exists (it was deleted, the app was removed or the workflow was turned off), we pause the connection and show the reason on the settings page. Create a new webhook, paste its URL into the connection (or switch the connection back on once you’ve fixed it), and alerts resume. Each connection also shows its recent alerts and whether they arrived.
What an alert contains — and your customers’ privacy
An alert names your website, the visitor, the channel (chat, email, WhatsApp, …) and — unless you switch it off — a short excerpt of what the visitor wrote (up to 200 characters, as plain text).
- The visitor is shown by their name, or by their email address only when your website verified it. An address a visitor merely typed into the chat could be anyone’s, so it is never shown; such visitors appear as “Visitor” followed by a short code.
- Turning on alerts sends that excerpt to the chat tool you chose. It is then stored by Slack, Microsoft or Discord under their terms, and erasing a person’s data in IsTyping does not remove alerts already posted there. If that matters for your customers, switch off Include the customer’s message text on the connection: alerts then only say who is waiting, for example “New conversation from Jane”.
- Private notes, your team’s replies and conversation history are never sent.
- Anything a visitor writes is sent as plain text: it can’t ping your channel (
@channel,@everyone,@here), disguise a link behind other words, or use the tool’s formatting to change how the alert looks.