Every 30 minutes
Make sure no question goes unanswered
Questions in your help channel that nobody answered after 2 hours get a nudge to the right people.
- Runs
- Every 30 minutes
- Apps
- Slack
- AI
- Not needed
- Access
- channels:history, chat:write
Send this to your assistant
Create a ClickRuntime automation: every 30 minutes, find messages in #help with no reply after 2 hours and reply in the thread tagging @support.
First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.
Why use it
Why teams use this automation
In a support or community channel like #help, a question can sit for hours. The people who know the answer are in meetings, or they saw the message, assumed someone else would take it, and moved on. The asker, often a new hire or a customer-facing colleague with a deadline, gets no reply and no explanation. They stop asking, work around the problem, or interrupt a senior person directly, which defeats the reason the channel exists.
Every 30 minutes, ClickRuntime reads the recent history of the channel, checks each top-level message's reply count, and for any question older than two hours with no replies, posts a short nudge in its thread and remembers that it has done so. Each question is bumped once, and questions that have an answer are left alone.
Internal IT desks, developer-relations channels and community managers who want visible response times tend to use it.
What you get out of it
Questions stop falling through the cracks
A message with zero replies after two hours is the clearest sign that nobody owns it. A gentle bump in the thread brings it back to the attention of people who scrolled past.
Response times improve without pressure
Nobody has to be assigned as the channel watcher. A neutral automated nudge carries the reminder, so people do not feel singled out and the channel keeps a friendly tone while still moving faster. Over a few weeks the channel builds a habit of answering within hours.
Newcomers keep asking
New employees often hesitate to ask twice. When the channel itself follows up on silence, they learn that questions are expected and taken seriously, which shortens their ramp-up. A confident new hire is productive sooner.
Experts are not overwhelmed by repeats
Because the same question is bumped only once, the thread does not become a stream of reminders. Senior people see a single prompt and can answer, redirect or mark it as handled.
Gaps in knowledge become visible
Questions that still draw no answer after the bump point to topics nobody on the team knows well. That helps a lead decide where documentation, training or a new hire is needed.
How it works
What happens, step by step
Every 30 minutes ClickRuntime looks at the last day of messages in your help channel.
It finds questions that have had no replies for more than two hours.
It replies in the thread and tags your support group so someone picks it up.
It remembers which questions it has already nudged, so nobody gets pinged twice for the same one.
Before it runs live
- Connect Slack, then invite the app to the channel (type /invite @ClickRuntime there)
What you get
Build your own
Need it to work differently?
Your own rules
Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.
Any number of apps
One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.
AI where it helps
Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.
On a schedule or on each event
Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.
Changes you can ask for
- Act only on the items that match your own rules, and skip the rest
- Add an AI step, for example to summarize, sort or draft a reply
- Add another app, for example also send it to Google Sheets
- Combine it with other Slack steps into one automation
Under the hood
The code that runs this automation
import time
from slack_sdk import WebClient
from clickruntime import on_trigger, report_fetched, credentials, state
HELP = "C04HELP000"
SUPPORT_GROUP = "S05SUPPORT"
@on_trigger
def run(event):
slack = WebClient(token=credentials.connection("slack", "work"))
now = time.time()
msgs = slack.conversations_history(channel=HELP, oldest=str(now - 86400), limit=200)["messages"]
bumped = set(state.get("bumped") or [])
due = [m for m in msgs if m.get("user") and not m.get("reply_count")
and now - float(m["ts"]) > 2 * 3600 and m["ts"] not in bumped]
report_fetched(len(due))
if not due:
return {"summary": "Nothing to bump"}
for m in due:
slack.chat_postMessage(channel=HELP, thread_ts=m["ts"],
text=f"<!subteam^{SUPPORT_GROUP}> this one has been waiting over 2 hours.")
bumped.add(m["ts"])
state.set("bumped", sorted(bumped)[-500:])
return {"bumped": len(due)}FAQ
Common questions
Does it bump questions that were already answered?
How does it tell a question from other messages?
Will it ping a specific person or group?
What permissions does it need?
Does it need AI?
How many runs does it use?
Can I change how it works?
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