#ask-it, a private message, or a web form?
The answer is all of them. Every entry point routes into the same workspace, gets the same triage, and produces the same ticket, so restricting people to one only costs you requests. What is worth deciding is which one you point people at first, and that is what this page is about.
The four entry points
Microsoft Teams covers the channel path as well, in early access. Teams 1:1 chats with the bot are not processed yet, so in Teams the connected channel is the entry point.
Public channels: shared context by default
A public channel like#ask-it is the highest-leverage place for a question to land, because the answer is visible to everyone who has the same question next week.
What public channels are good at
What public channels are good at
- Shared context. Everyone sees the question and the answer, so repeat volume falls.
- Visible workload. The team and its stakeholders can see how much is coming in.
- Searchable history. Past threads become de facto self-service documentation, and the agent can search the channel if you connect it as a knowledge source.
- No direct interruption. Responders pick work up when they are ready instead of being pinged personally.
Where they fall down
Where they fall down
- Hesitation. Plenty of people will not post a question publicly that they think sounds basic.
- Noise. A busy channel is hard to follow without triage.
- Nothing is sensitive-safe. Payroll, performance, and access questions do not belong here.
Slack DMs: the low-friction path
A private request goes to the Ravenna bot, not to anybody’s personal DMs. To the requester it feels like messaging a coworker. For the team, it lands in the same workspace as everything else. The DM experience is a standard Slack direct message: your conversations live in the Messages tab and the agent replies in-thread, so each request keeps its own context. Slack groups AI apps under Agents in the sidebar, which is where you find Ravenna. Two mechanics that matter when you set this up:- Routing follows agent presence. A workspace becomes available in DMs when an agent is connected to its Slack channel. The Available in Slack visibility toggle does not affect DM routing, it only controls whether the workspace appears when filing from the Slack home tab.
- The Slack channel takes multiple agents. Slack and Portal are system channels and hold as many agents as you connect, so different agents can answer different kinds of DM. Every other channel holds one.
Learn more about Slack direct messages
The Portal: the entry point people forget
Slack does not reach everyone. Contractors, frontline and shift workers, staff in other departments, and anyone without a Slack account need a front door too, and without one they end up emailing someone they happen to know. The Portal gives them a branded web page with featured forms, their own ticket history, and agent chat. It is also the better surface for a genuinely long form, because a twelve-field intake is miserable in a chat window.Learn more about launching the Portal
What the agent does across all of them
The same agent handles every entry point, with the same rules, knowledge, and tools. Requesters get instant acknowledgment and often an instant answer, whether they asked in a channel, a DM, the Portal, or by email. The team gets requests that arrive already categorized, prioritized, and routed, and a clean handoff when a human is needed. That is what makes opening four doors cheap. Without automatic triage, each new entry point is another place requests go unnoticed. With it, they all converge on the same list.Recommendation: default to public, open everything else
- Point people at the public channel first. Announce it, link it, put it in onboarding. It is the only entry point that gets cheaper as volume grows.
- Leave DMs on. They cost you nothing and capture the requests that would otherwise not be filed at all.
- Turn the Portal on if any part of your audience is outside Slack, which for most companies it is.
- Keep email if you already have a shared inbox. Forwarding it is easier than retraining external senders.
- Nudge, do not enforce. When something sensitive shows up in public, move it and tell the requester where to go next time.
Learn more about channels, views, and categories and Portal and privacy
Next
Set up your first channel
The public channel, end to end.
Email support
Point an existing shared inbox at a channel.