Managing Conversations
A short guide to working conversations as a human agent in Octocom
Octocom's help desk is built around a simple idea: the inbox should stay as small as possible. Every open conversation is something that still needs attention. Your job as an agent is to move each one out of the open state — by closing it or snoozing it — so that what remains is always what truly needs work right now.
This guide is the day-to-day workflow. The states it refers to are explained in Ticket States; read that first if you haven't.
Taking a conversation over
Most conversations reach Octocom before they reach you. The bot answers what it can and hands off what it can't, and a handed-off conversation is one you can act on immediately.
Occasionally you'll want to step into a conversation the bot still owns — a customer getting frustrated, a case you can see going wrong, a VIP you'd rather handle personally. Those are read-only until you use Take over conversation in the conversation header. Until then there is no reply box and no assignee picker.
Taking over is a handoff, and handoffs are permanent: the bot will not answer that customer again in that conversation. Take over when you intend to own the outcome, not to peek.
You can still tag, annotate and prioritize a bot-owned conversation without taking it over.
The daily loop
- Open your own queue — Your Inbox, or whichever view holds work assigned to you. Work top to bottom.
- For each conversation, decide: can I finish this right now?
- When your own queue is empty, pick up unowned work — a queue of handed-off conversations nobody has answered yet.
- Repeat.
The inbox is a to-do list, not an archive. Close or snooze, every time.
When to close
Close when you're finished from your side: you answered the question, fulfilled the request, or there's nothing further to do.
Close optimistically. If you've sent a complete answer, close it. Don't keep conversations open in case the customer replies — if they do, it reopens on its own with your assignment and history intact.
When to snooze
Snooze when you need a guarantee the conversation comes back even if the customer never replies:
- You're waiting on internal information — a teammate, a supplier, a fix to ship — and need to follow up afterwards.
- The issue is sensitive and policy requires someone to check in proactively.
- You promised the customer an update by a specific date.
The durations in the snooze menu are configurable for your workspace, and you can always pick an exact date and time instead. When a snooze expires the conversation comes back flagged as returned, and a customer message during the snooze brings it back immediately.
Assignment
Assignment records who owns a conversation. One person at a time, or nobody.
An assignee is set in three ways:
- Someone assigns it — from the conversation, in bulk from the list, or through a macro.
- You reply to it. Replying assigns the conversation to you, even if a colleague had it. This is intentional: whoever is talking to the customer owns the conversation.
- You close it. Closing assigns it to you if it wasn't already.
Admin accounts are excluded from the last two, so an admin can answer or tidy up without taking ownership.
The assignee is only removed manually, and it survives closing, reopening and snoozing. A conversation that comes back weeks later comes back to the same person.
Two constraints worth knowing:
- A conversation must be handed off before it can be assigned. Bot-owned conversations have no assignee picker; take over first.
- Your workspace may distribute work automatically. If auto-assignment is switched on, conversations are handed out as they're escalated. See Assignment & Routing for the policies, rules and caps.
Working faster
Macros are saved replies plus actions — insert a response, apply a tag, assign, snooze, or close, in one click. Any reply you write more than twice should be a macro. This is the single biggest lever on how many conversations an agent can handle in an hour.
Notes are internal comments the customer never sees. Leave one whenever the next person to open the conversation would otherwise have to reconstruct what happened.
Tags and priority classify conversations so views, reporting and routing have something to work with.
The conversation sidebar carries the customer's orders, returns, subscriptions and previous conversations — and lets you refund, cancel or edit an order without leaving the page. Before asking the customer for information, check whether it's already on screen.
Other actions
From the conversation's action menu you can also merge it with another of the customer's conversations, open an external thread with a supplier or warehouse, forward the conversation by email, export it as a PDF, and mark it as spam. From the conversation list you can select several conversations at once to assign or close them in bulk.
A note on "resolved"
Some help desks have a "resolved" state that means "I think I'm done but I'm not sure." Octocom doesn't. The rule is:
If you can't do anything more on a conversation right now, close it. If you need to make sure you come back to it, snooze it.
That's the entire decision. A resolved conversation is a closed one, and whether the bot or a person resolved it is recorded separately as the handoff state.