What a conversation is, who is driving it, how it ends, and what that means for your plan.
A conversation is one customer talking to one deployment on one channel. It starts with their first message, or with the greeting if your webchat opens with one, and it ends when the flow finishes or when they stop replying. Everything in between is recorded: their messages, the bot's replies, an agent's replies, and each step the flow took.
The same person on two channels is two conversations. The same person on the same channel, coming back after a conversation has ended, is usually a new conversation too. Intercom is the exception, covered below.
A rollout can keep a customer out of a new deployment. A conversation the rollout turned away is recorded as Filtered, stays that way, and never reaches the bot or the inbox. See Rollouts.
At any moment a conversation is either the bot's or a person's. It is the bot's until one of these happens:
From then on the bot stays quiet and the customer's messages wait for a person. Resume bot in the inbox hands it back. Who is driving decides how long a quiet conversation stays open, which is the next section.
| Ends as | What happened | Counts toward your plan |
|---|---|---|
| Completed | The flow reached its end, or an agent closed the thread in Intercom. | Yes |
| Timed out | The customer was answered, then went quiet for the whole window. This is the ordinary ending for most chats. | Yes |
| Abandoned | The customer wrote and never got an answer, or nobody wrote at all, and the window passed. | No |
| Filtered | A rollout kept the customer out. | No |
The window depends on who was driving:
On Intercom, a conversation the bot was driving is also closed in your Intercom inbox when it ends. One a person holds is left open there for them.
A conversation counts when the customer sent at least one message and got a reply, from the bot or from an agent. Chats that opened without the visitor writing, messages nobody answered, and sessions in the simulator do not count. Neither does WhatsApp history you imported when connecting a number.
A conversation is counted in the month it ends, not the month it started. Your usage page shows the running total, and the pricing page has each plan's allowance.
Every conversation except a filtered one is in the inbox from the moment it starts, whoever is driving it. Open holds everything live. Bot shows the ones the bot is handling, and Needs reply the ones where the customer spoke last and a person has to answer.
When a conversation ends it moves to Resolved on its own. You can also resolve one yourself while it is still running, and that ends it: it completes if it was answered, or is abandoned if nothing ever replied to the customer, so resolving spam costs nothing. On Intercom the thread is closed too. Reopen brings a resolved conversation back to Open and takes it for a person, with the bot paused.
The rest of the inbox, claiming, snoozing and replying, is covered in Using the inbox.
On webchat, the mobile app, Telegram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, a customer who returns after a conversation has ended starts a new one, and the bot answers from the beginning. The old one stays in your history as it ended.
The exception is a conversation a person resolved. On Telegram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, a reply within 24 hours of the resolve is almost always a follow-up, so it reopens the same conversation for the person who resolved it, with the bot still paused. After 24 hours it starts a new one. Change the window in your workspace settings, or for one deployment in its settings.
On Intercom the same thread carries on, and who picks it up follows Intercom. If a teammate is still assigned to it in Intercom, it goes back to them with the bot paused. Otherwise the bot takes it back: a completed conversation starts the flow from the beginning, and one that timed out picks up where it left off. Either way it comes back to Open in the inbox. An Intercom deployment that hands conversations to your inbox queue follows the same rule as the other channels instead: a reply soon after a person resolved the conversation goes back to them, and a later one goes to the bot.
CSAT comes with the Pro and Business plans, and with Business Desk in UniversalDesk. Customers are asked to rate a conversation when it ends, on the deployments you choose. The rating shows on the conversation, in the inbox and on its page in your dashboard.
Set it up under Support → Satisfaction: the question, the thank-you message, how long customers have to answer, and which endings are asked about. Then turn on Ask for a rating in the settings of each deployment that should ask. A deployment asks nothing until you do, and can use its own question and thank-you message.
data-csat="off" to the embed snippet.Support → Satisfaction shows how customers rated their conversations over the last 7, 30 or 90 days. CSAT is the share of ratings that were a 4 or 5. Beside it are how it moved since the period before, the bot's score next to your team's, how many surveys were answered, and how the ratings spread from 1 to 5. The latest low ratings are listed with a link to each conversation, so someone can follow up, along with the agents and flows with the lowest score. An agent or flow needs at least 5 ratings in the period before it is compared.
Full report opens the Satisfaction report under Support reports, with each team, agent, channel, priority, flow or deployment on its own row: ratings, how many were satisfied, neutral and unsatisfied, CSAT, the average rating, and how many surveys were sent, answered and expired. It downloads as CSV.
The question is the last thing the customer hears: anything your flow does when a conversation ends, such as a goodbye message, goes first. A conversation is asked at most once a week, so an Intercom thread the customer keeps coming back to isn't asked every time. Conversations that nothing answered, that a person never resolved within 7 days, and simulator sessions are never asked. The question doesn't count as a reply toward your plan. On WhatsApp you can also hold it back from customers who replied UNSUBSCRIBE; see WhatsApp opt-outs.
A trigger runs in the background when a conversation ends, on Completed, Timed Out or Abandoned, or on Closed, which fires for all three. Tag the conversation, record how it went, call an API. See Triggers.
Flows → Conversations lists every conversation in the workspace. Filter by how it ended, by channel or by date, and open one to read the transcript and see the path it took through the flow. A flow's Analytics shows how many completed. Simulator sessions are kept apart from real ones and never appear here.
The inbox is for working the live ones. The dashboard is for looking back.
A conversation is kept for 24 months after its last activity, then deleted with its messages, files and notes.