Autoresponder
Acknowledging emails that arrive on conversations already waiting for a human.
Once a conversation has been handed off, the bot stops answering. If the customer emails again before your team gets to it, they hear nothing back — and a customer who has already been told a human is coming, and then gets silence, tends to email a third time.
The autoresponder closes that gap. It sends one fixed acknowledgement when an email lands on a conversation that's already waiting for a person.
Settings are under Settings → Help Desk → Autoresponder, per business.
When it fires
Every condition must hold:
- The conversation is already handed off.
- The new message arrives by email. Other channels are unaffected.
- No autoresponder message has been sent on that conversation before.
That last point is the important one: at most one autoresponder message per conversation, ever. A customer who emails five times into the same thread gets one acknowledgement, not five. It is an acknowledgement, not a nag.
It does not fire on the handoff itself — only when the customer writes again afterwards. A customer who hands off and waits patiently never sees it.
Settings
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Enable autoresponder | Off | Turns the whole thing on. |
| Response message | A generic acknowledgement | The exact text sent. No AI is involved — it goes out verbatim. |
| Auto-close conversation | Off | Closes the conversation after sending. It reopens if the customer writes again. |
On the message
Write something that earns the interruption. A bare "we have received your message" tells the customer nothing they don't know. Better ones say when they'll hear back, and — if you're behind — say so:
Thanks for the follow-up. Your message is with our team and we're replying to everything in order, currently within one working day. You don't need to write again; we'll come back to you.
The "you don't need to write again" line is the one that actually reduces repeat emails.
On auto-close
Turning this on treats the acknowledgement as the end of a round: the conversation closes, and reopens the moment the customer replies. It keeps queues clean during a backlog, at the cost of a conversation leaving your open views while a person still owes the customer an answer.
Leave it off unless you specifically want that behaviour. Most teams shouldn't.
When to use it
The autoresponder exists for periods when your response time is longer than usual — a sale, a holiday, an incident, a backlog. Turning it on with a message that names the real wait is far better than letting customers guess.
In steady state, with same-day replies, it adds a message the customer didn't need. Enable it deliberately rather than leaving it on permanently.
Web chat is different
Web chat has its own post-handoff behaviour, and it isn't configured here. If a customer keeps typing in the widget after being handed off, they get a written acknowledgement telling them when the team will respond — and unlike the email autoresponder it responds each time, until an agent actually joins the conversation.
That behaviour is on by default and takes its wording from your web chat response-time setting rather than from this page.