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. That clears it from your queue and nothing more: it does not end the conversation, and the bot or the window still decides that. Reopen brings a resolved conversation back to Open.
The rest of the inbox, claiming, snoozing and replying, is covered in Using the inbox.
On webchat, Telegram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, a customer who returns after a conversation has ended starts a new one. The old one stays in your history as it ended.
On Intercom the same thread carries on. If it had completed, the bot takes it back and starts the flow from the beginning. If it had timed out or been abandoned, it picks up where it left off, and if a person was holding it they still are. Either way it comes back to Open in the inbox.
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.
Conversations in your dashboard 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.