Skip to content

Slack voice messages: How to get new voicemail notifications

Slack voice message: How to get a voicemail notification in Slack

For teams that spend much of their workdays collaborating on Slack, turning voicemails into Slack voice messages can be a game changer. You’ll no longer have to hop from app to app to listen to your voicemail messages, which can be a big roadblock to productivity. 

Plus, when you make your voicemails available on more than one channel, you can speed up your response by listening on the most convenient platform for you.

Here’s how you can receive Slack voice message notifications for forwarded voicemail and how doing so can help your team be more responsive.

How to receive Slack voice messages in any channel

The simplest way to receive your voicemails as Slack voice messages is by choosing a business phone system that can integrate with your Slack app. While not all VoIP phones offer this direct connection, OpenPhone offers a Slack integration that can instantly send your voicemail audio files to a Slack channel of your choice. We also throw in free voicemail transcription with every Slack voice message to make your life a little easier. 🙌

If you’re the admin or account owner of your OpenPhone workspace, you can start receiving voicemails on Slack in six quick steps. Open your web or desktop app, then follow these directions to set up your Slack integration:

  1. Click “Settings” from the left-hand menu.
  2. Under “Workspace,” select “Phone Numbers.”
  3. Choose the OpenPhone number you want to connect to Slack.
  4. Scroll down and select “Connect to your Slack” under “Integrations.” Sign into Slack when you receive the prompt.
  5. Grant OpenPhone permission to post in your Slack workspace. Then, choose the specific Slack channel you want your messages to appear in.
  6. Toggle on “Voicemails” to start receiving voicemail messages and transcriptions on Slack. (Hot tip: You can also toggle on Slack alerts for “Messages” and “Missed Calls” to forward your text messages and get missed call notifications, even if your caller doesn’t leave an audio message.)
Slack voice message: OpenPhone sales inbox on Slack

Each time a caller leaves a voicemail, you’ll see a message appear in your designated Slack channel in real time. Slack users can tap “jump to convo” or “call back” — both of which will take them back to OpenPhone — to take action on each voicemail. 📱 In case you haven’t already, be sure to invite team members to your OpenPhone workspace if they’ll need to use these features.

How teams use voicemail forwarding in Slack

OpenPhone’s Slack integration is a highly versatile tool that any business can take advantage of. With the ability to read and listen to every incoming message, your team members can improve their response times (and their overall responsiveness).

Here are five ways your team can use voicemail forwarding in Slack to get powerful results.

1. Prioritize the right messages

Keeping up with calls, texts, and voicemails can be difficult when you’re on the go. However, voicemail forwarding makes it easy to determine which callers need an immediate response.

Awesome Website Guys, an agency based in the US, uses voicemail forwarding on OpenPhone to keep their remote team in the loop about incoming calls. Upon receiving new voicemail notifications, their team members can jump on Slack’s Android or iPhone app to figure out who’s calling and review each transcript to determine what they’re calling about. This way, they’re able to prioritize responses to existing clients and urgent voicemails.

Awesome Website Guys also use auto-replies to encourage callers to text them so their team can be more responsive. “Even our clients love that they can text instead of call and know we will be on top of it,” says Logan Lenz, owner at Awesome Website Guys.

If your team members are often outside of the office — or simply busy throughout the day — integrating Slack with your business phone app can help them use their time wisely by gauging who really needs an immediate response.

2. Keep an eye on your priority support line

If you have a separate priority support line for your customers or select VIPs, you need a way to ensure you’re actually putting their support first. Slack voice messages can increase the visibility of their voicemails, so your team members can get back to them as soon as possible.

3. Get notified about emergency calls

When business hours are over, you’re no longer taking business calls. However, many businesses keep an emergency line open for clients who truly need urgent support. Setting up voicemail forwarding to Slack (or voicemail to email) for your emergency line can help you manage your after-hours calls with ease.

Even if you accidentally miss a call, you won’t risk missing an urgent voicemail as long as you have your Slack mobile app notifications turned on. Each time your clients record voice messages, you’ll get an alert. Plus, you can use your Slack app to let your after-hours team know you’re already working on a voicemail response.

4. Collaborate on missed calls

OpenPhone already makes collaboration easy by allowing team members to create internal comment threads and assign tasks after calls. However, when jumping on Slack is more convenient than using your VoIP platform — for example, if you’re crunched on time and just need anyone to respond to a voicemail — voicemail forwarding ensures that everyone has the context they need.

As a Slack voice message appears, you can comment on it, react to it with emojis, or even direct message it to specific members of your team. This flexibility makes it easy for your team to develop your own system for responding to voicemails — one that works especially for your team’s needs.

5. Find and review voicemails with ease

Forwarding your voicemails to Slack can be part of your record-keeping process. When you send all your voice messages to a dedicated Slack channel, your team members can easily scroll through and find the voicemail they need to review. They can also use Slack’s native search function to find voicemails based on specific keywords.

David Peters saved voicemail transcripts

Keep in mind you can also search by keyword(s) for a voicemail transcript in OpenPhone by simply clicking “Search” from the left-hand menu of the web or desktop app.

Having transcripts and audio files with unlimited playbacks readily available can give your team enormous peace of mind. For example, if you’ve deleted a voicemail message on OpenPhone but forgot a crucial piece of information that your caller provided, you can simply look back at past transcripts on Slack.

Since Slack automatically saves all messages and audio files by default, you won’t have to worry about losing important information unless you’ve adjusted your own message and file retention settings.

Get more out of Slack with OpenPhone

OpenPhone mobile and desktop app

Slack is best known as an internal communication tool, but with OpenPhone, you can use the platform to improve your client communication too. Setting up voicemail forwarding to Slack helps you increase the visibility of voicemail messages by making them available on the Slack app, on top of OpenPhone’s Android, iOS, Mac, PC, and web apps. Your team members can easily listen to and read voicemail messages from any device to quickly take action on the most urgent calls.

Beyond Slack, OpenPhone also offers integrations with a number of other popular business apps — including Zapier, Gmail, and HubSpot CRM — with many more coming soon. Sign up for your free trial of OpenPhone to make this year’s calls far more efficient than last year’s.

4.8/5 - (9 votes)