Handling a conversation

A conversation is one customer's thread on the channel they wrote from, and opening it gives you the thread plus everything known about the person who sent it. That pairing is the point: answering well usually depends on what happened before, and here you are not asked to go and find it.

The contact profile

On the right, Contact profile holds two things.

Properties are the facts your agent worked out for itself: Language, Sentiment and Priority. Nobody fills these in by hand.

Tags are what the conversation is about, written as family and subtype, like Subscription · Change. A tag your agent applied carries a small sparkle. A tag without one was added by a person.

That sparkle is worth understanding, because it tells you where a value came from. And if you change one by hand, it stops being the agent's and becomes yours.

Replying

The composer tells you which channel your reply is going out on before you write a word, because a reply on a live chat and a reply by email are not the same message. You get formatting, attachments and emoji, and files work in both directions, so a customer can send a photo of a damaged product and you can send back a label.

For the answers you send every week, use a macro. It fills in the customer and order details from the conversation itself, and it can carry an action, so replying and closing is one motion. By default a macro is rendered into the customer's language when it sends, so a Spanish macro reaches a French customer in French.

The actions in the header

Along the top: who it is assigned to, whether it is starred, and Close.

The assignee is the one to watch. If it shows AI, this conversation is assigned to your agent and it is working on it. Taking it over reassigns it to you, and from that point your agent leaves it alone.

Open, closed, resolved

Three states, and the middle one is the one people misread.

• Open. Live. Nothing closes by itself.
• Closed. Handled, but recent. If the customer replies it reopens as live work again, which is why this is a waiting room rather than an archive. Check who it lands with, because a reopened conversation does not necessarily come back to whoever closed it.
• Resolved. Archived. A later message from the same person starts a new conversation instead of reviving this one.

Closed becomes resolved on its own once enough time passes with no reply: 24 hours on live chat, 7 days on email, 72 hours on everything else. The clock starts when you close it, and reopening resets it.

Email gets the longest window because email replies genuinely arrive days later. Live chat gets the shortest because those are settled in the moment or not at all.

Snooze

For the conversations where the next move is not yours: waiting on a carrier, a supplier, a photo. Snooze it and it leaves your working views until the time you picked, or the instant the customer replies, whichever comes first.

Which is the important part. A snooze cannot bury anything, because a reply always wakes it.