Handle conversations

How support conversations open, snooze, and close, plus priority, internal notes and mentions, translation, CSAT requests, and handoff from Quinn.

A conversation is a real-time thread with a customer, started from the Messages tab in your widget, from the portal, or from an inbound support email. This article covers the conversation lifecycle, priority, internal notes, translation, satisfaction ratings, and handoff from Quinn.

Lifecycle

Every conversation is open, snoozed, or closed. A few rules keep the state honest:

A customer reply reopens the conversation, whether it was closed or snoozed, unless it is a satisfaction rating or an auto-reply that lands after close.
A teammate reply reopens a closed conversation, but a snoozed one stays snoozed. Use this to send a quick update without waking a thread you deliberately parked.
A teammate other than the assignee changing a snoozed conversation (assigning it, tagging it, and so on) wakes it back to open.

For Messenger chats you can change the first rule. In Settings > Support > Channels > Messenger, turn off Reopen when a visitor replies under Closed conversations, and a reply to a closed chat starts a new conversation instead. Email replies always reopen.

Priority

Set priority to None, Low, Medium, High, or Urgent from the conversation or from the inbox bulk action bar. Priority feeds sorting, saved view filters, and workflow conditions, so a workflow can route or escalate urgent conversations differently.

Internal notes and mentions

Notes are internal-only messages in the same thread. The customer never sees them, they do not count as a public reply, and they never trigger a customer notification. Type @ in a note to mention a teammate. The mention:

shows up in that teammate's Mentions view in the inbox
sends them an in-app notification

Mentions are team-only. If a customer's message contains an @, it is not treated as a mention.

Waiting on the customer or on your team

Every open conversation is either waiting on the customer's reply or on your team's. The Waiting chip in the inbox shows conversations sitting with your team. Workflows have "customer stopped responding" and "teammate hasn't responded" triggers that fire after a silence threshold you set, so you can nudge, escalate, or close a thread nobody has touched. See Build a workflow.

Note: This waiting state is separate from an SLA policy. Waiting state is about who is expected to act next. An SLA is a timed target you apply deliberately.

Translation

When translation is on, incoming messages are translated for display only. The original stays the stored content, so different teammates can read it in their own language. Outgoing replies are translated before sending: the translated text is what the customer receives, and the original is kept for reference.

A reply that contains an image or another rich embed cannot be translated. Send it without translation, or as plain text.

Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

Satisfaction ratings (1 to 5, with an optional comment) are not collected automatically when a conversation closes. Request one from a workflow with the CSAT action. For email conversations, the request also goes out as a one-click rating email, so the customer can respond without opening the portal.

Turn a conversation into a ticket

When a request needs tracking beyond the chat, click Create ticket in the conversation header or press c. The new customer ticket links back to the conversation. See Manage support tickets.

Handoff from Quinn

When the Quinn Agent cannot resolve something itself (an explicit request for a human, repeated confusion, low confidence, or a safety concern), it hands the conversation to your team. The handoff posts as an event in the thread, and it is a trigger your workflows can react to, for example to route the conversation to the right team.