How to customize the Slack message Google Forms posts

The default template is a Slack message with an inbox-tray icon, the form title, the submission timestamp, and the fields as bold question / plain answer. Three quick changes cover the common "make it ours" ask without restructuring anything.

1. 1
   Change the header line

   Replace New response on {{form.title}} with whatever fits — New lead from website, Support ticket opened, Booking request. The header is what the channel sees in the notification preview, so make it scan-friendly.
2. 2
   Swap the icon emoji

   The icon_emoji field accepts any Slack emoji shortcode — :rotating_light: for urgent alerts, :briefcase: for job applications, :calendar: for bookings. Custom workspace emoji work too. The icon shows next to the message sender name in the channel.
3. 3
   Append a footer CTA

   A context block at the bottom with a link out, to the CRM record, the form's response sheet, a calendar booking page. Pattern: "Reply within 5 min — <https://crm.example/lead/123|open in CRM>". Keeps the channel actionable rather than just informational.

A message in a busy channel without a mention often gets missed. Mentions are the single most useful customisation for any channel with more than one person watching.

• Single person: <@U01ABCXYZ>. Use when one person owns the response (the assigned rep, the on-call engineer). Find the user ID in the Slack profile's three-dot menu.
• User group: <!subteam^S012ABC|sales>. Pings everyone in the group; one person picks up. Best for shared inboxes where any member can handle the response.
• Channel: <#C012ABC> mentions a channel by ID, it renders as a clickable channel link. Useful in cross-channel summaries.
• Avoid @here and @channel: they ping everyone present, which trains people to mute. Reserve them for genuinely urgent shapes, a P0 incident form, not a normal lead.

*New lead* — {{response.field['Company']}}
<@U01ABCXYZ>, your assigned rep
{{response.field['Notes']}}

The default template renders every form field as a row. For forms with 8+ fields, that produces a wall of text the channel scrolls past. The fix is to surface high-signal fields inline at the top, then either drop low-signal fields or collapse them into a quote block.

1. 1
   Identify high-signal fields

   The fields a teammate needs in the first 2 seconds, name, company, role, urgency. Everything else (consent checkboxes, source dropdowns, internal notes) is delivery-log content, not channel content.
2. 2
   Pull the high-signal fields into the header

   Use {{response.field['Name']}} placeholders inline: *Lead*: {{response.field['Name']}} from {{response.field['Company']}}. The bold header reads as the summary; the body becomes optional.
3. 3
   Drop or collapse the rest

   For lead alerts, often just the name + company is enough, the rest lives in the delivery log and the CRM. For triage channels (support tickets), keep the issue summary inline but collapse customer-context fields into a quote block at the bottom for click-through.
4. 4
   Use the field extractor to plan

   Paste your form JSON into /tools/google-forms-field-extractor. It lists every field with its exact key so the template references are guaranteed to match.

Block Kit is Slack's structured message format, instead of one markdown blob, the message is a JSON array of typed blocks (sections, dividers, contexts, headers, fields). The upgrade is worth it for two shapes: dashboards (multiple stats side-by-side) and triage messages with link buttons.

• Header block: the large bold title at the top. One line, ≤ 150 chars. Use for the form name or the alert type.
• Section with fields: up to 10 fields rendered in a 2-column grid. Best for displaying 4–8 short key/value pairs (lead score, urgency, time zone, source).
• Context block: small text at the bottom, often with a small icon and a timestamp. Where the "Reply within 5 min" CTA lives.
• Actions block (link buttons): buttons that link out to a CRM, a calendar, an internal docs page. Click-action buttons need a Slack app; link buttons just work.
• Divider block: a thin horizontal rule between sections. Useful when one form posts multi-section summaries.

• Custom templates skip Slack's default rendering. The built-in template handles every form shape automatically; once you customise, you own the format. If you add a field to the form later, you have to add it to the template too.
• Per-rule templates duplicate logic. Three rules with three templates means three places to update when the brand changes. For forms with many rules, prefer making the base template good and overriding only where strictly necessary.
• Mentions train channels. Over-mentioning makes the team mute the channel; under-mentioning means the message gets missed. Calibrate per channel, a high-volume triage channel might mention nobody and let triage pull from it; a low-volume VIP channel might always mention.
• Block Kit is verbose in the editor.You're editing JSON, not prose. The visual preview helps, but expect a learning curve. For simple shapes, mrkdwn beats Block Kit on maintainability.