Managing Conversations

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 your attention. Your job as an agent is to move each one out of the open state — either by closing it or by snoozing it — so that what remains is always what truly needs work right now.

This guide walks through the conversation lifecycle, the default views you'll use to find work, and the tools that help you move through tickets quickly.

The conversation lifecycle

A conversation in Octocom has three possible states:

• Open — The conversation is active and waiting for someone (you, a teammate, or the bot) to do something. It shows up in inbox views and counts toward your workload.
• Snoozed — The conversation is temporarily hidden from the inbox. It will automatically reopen at a time you choose, or when the customer replies.
• Closed — The conversation is done. It disappears from open views but stays fully searchable and can be reopened at any time if the customer writes back.

There is intentionally no "resolved" state. In some help desks, "resolved" is a halfway state that means "I think I'm done but I'm not sure." Octocom doesn't have this. 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.

When to close

Close a conversation when you're finished with it from your side. You answered the question, fulfilled the request, or there's nothing further to do. If the customer replies later, the conversation automatically reopens and lands back in the inbox — closing it doesn't lose anything.

A useful default: close optimistically. If you've sent a complete answer, close it. Don't keep tickets open "just in case" the customer might reply — that's exactly what reopening is for.

When to snooze

Snooze when you need a guarantee that the conversation will come back to you, even if the customer never replies. Common cases:

• You're waiting on internal information (a teammate, a supplier, a fix to ship) and need to follow up with the customer afterward.
• The issue is sensitive and your company policy requires that someone proactively checks in.
• You promised the customer an update by a specific date.

When the snooze expires, the conversation reopens automatically and is flagged so you can see it came back from a snooze.

Reopening

You don't usually have to reopen things by hand. A conversation reopens automatically when:

• A snooze expires.
• The customer sends a new message on a closed conversation.

You can also reopen a closed conversation manually if you need to.

Handoff and the Human view

The bot handles conversations on its own until it can't — at that point it hands off to a human. A handed-off conversation that is still open is, by definition, something a human needs to deal with.

These conversations live in the Human view in the sidebar. The rule is simple:

If a conversation is handed off and open, it's in the Human tab and a human needs to handle it.

Once you've handled it (replied, closed, snoozed, or assigned it elsewhere), it leaves the Human view naturally because either it's no longer open or it's been moved into a more specific queue.

Default views

Octocom ships with a set of default views in the conversation sidebar so you don't have to build queues from scratch:

• Your Inbox — Open conversations assigned to you. This is your personal work queue and should be the first place you look each day.
• Unassigned — Open conversations that nobody owns yet. Pick from here when you finish your inbox or when triaging incoming work.
• Human — Open conversations that have been handed off from the bot to a human. Anything here needs human attention.
• Bot — Conversations the bot is currently handling. You don't normally need to act on these, but it's useful for spot-checking bot behavior.
• Threads — Multi-message conversation threads that group related messages together.
• Spam — Conversations the system flagged as spam (only shown if spam detection is enabled).

On top of these, your team can create custom views — saved filters for any combination of tags, channels, assignees, business, language, sentiment, and so on. Custom views are how teams build specialized queues: "Returns for EU", "Urgent shipping issues", "Conversations tagged escalation", and so on.

The goal across all views is the same: drive the count down to zero by closing or snoozing.

Assignment

Assignment is how Octocom tracks who owns a conversation.

• An open conversation can be assigned to one agent or left unassigned.
• Assigning a conversation to yourself moves it into Your Inbox.
• Assigning to a teammate moves it into theirs.
• Unassigning puts it back into the Unassigned queue for anyone to pick up.

Assignment is independent of status — you can assign a snoozed or closed conversation, and the assignment sticks if it reopens. Octocom can also auto-assign incoming conversations based on rules your team configures (round-robin, by language, by tag, etc.).

A good team flow: triage from Unassigned in the morning, work down Your Inbox through the day, and let auto-assignment handle the rest.

Working faster with macros

Macros are saved replies and actions you can apply to a conversation in one click. A macro can:

• Insert a pre-written response (with variables like the customer's name or order ID filled in).
• Apply tags.
• Change the assignee.
• Close or snooze the conversation.

Macros are the single biggest lever for handling more conversations per hour. Any reply you find yourself writing more than twice should probably be a macro. Octocom can also recommend a macro automatically based on the conversation content, so the right one is often a single keystroke away.

Macros are organized in folders so a large library stays navigable — for example, "Returns", "Shipping", "Account issues".

Putting it together: a clean inbox workflow

A simple daily loop that keeps your inbox under control:

1. Open Your Inbox. Work top to bottom.
2. For each conversation, decide: can I finish this right now?
   • Yes — Reply (use a macro if one fits), then close.
   • No, but I need to follow up — Reply with what you can, then snooze until you'll have an answer.
   • No, and someone else should handle it — Reassign.
3. When Your Inbox is empty, check Human for handoffs and Unassigned for new work to triage.
4. Repeat.

The inbox is a to-do list, not an archive. Every conversation that's still open is a question you haven't answered yet — and your job is to answer it, or to schedule yourself to answer it later. Close or snooze, every time.