Ticket States
The two independent states every conversation carries — open/closed/snoozed, and handed off vs. not — and how they interact.
Every conversation in Octocom carries two completely separate states. They change independently, and almost every question about "where did this ticket go?" comes from treating them as one thing.
Read this page before the rest of the Help Desk section. Everything else builds on it.
State 1: Open, closed, or snoozed
This answers "does this conversation still need attention?"
- Open — Active. It shows up in working views and counts toward your workload.
- Closed — Finished. It drops out of open views but stays fully searchable.
- Snoozed — Temporarily hidden. It comes back on its own at a time you choose.
Closing is not permanent. A new message from the customer reopens a closed conversation automatically, and the assignee and history come back with it. This is why the guidance throughout these docs is to close optimistically rather than keeping tickets open "just in case."
There is deliberately no separate "resolved" state. A resolved conversation is simply a closed one. What tells you who resolved it is the second state, below.
Open is a property of the conversation, not of where it appears. Several views show open conversations, each sliced differently — so a conversation being open doesn't tell you which queue it lands in.
State 2: Handed off, or not
This answers "who owns this conversation, the bot or a person?"
- Not handed off — The bot owns it and is answering the customer.
- Handed off — A person owns it. The bot has stepped back.
Handoff is one-way and permanent
Once a conversation has been handed off, it never goes back to the bot. Not when it is closed, and not if the customer writes back weeks later. From that moment on, every reply to that customer has to come from a person.
There is no "return to bot" action, and nothing in the system reverses a handoff. If you want a customer's next issue handled by the bot, it has to arrive as a new conversation.
Handoff is not only something the bot decides. It also happens when an agent takes a conversation over, when an email rule routes a message straight to a human, when a conversation is marked as spam, and in several failure cases. Human Escalation covers the full list from the bot's side.
The two states are independent
A handed-off conversation can be open or closed. A bot conversation can be open or closed. All four combinations exist and all four are normal:
| Not handed off (bot owns it) | Handed off (a person owns it) | |
|---|---|---|
| Open | The bot is actively working it. Nothing for your team to do. | This is your work queue. Waiting for a person to reply. |
| Closed | The bot resolved it end to end, without a human. | A person resolved it. |
This grid is the answer to most reporting questions too. "How many did the bot solve on its own?" is closed + not handed off. "What is our handoff rate?" is the share of conversations that ever reached the right-hand column.
What you can and cannot do in each state
A conversation the bot still owns is read-only for agents. The reply box is hidden, and it cannot be assigned, closed, or snoozed. This is deliberate: two parties answering the same customer at the same time is worse than either one doing it alone.
To act on a bot-owned conversation, use Take over conversation in the conversation header. That hands it off to you — which, per the rule above, is permanent for that conversation.
| Bot owns it | Handed off | |
|---|---|---|
| Reply to the customer | ✗ (take over first) | ✓ |
| Assign to someone | ✗ | ✓ |
| Close or snooze | ✗ | ✓ |
| Add tags, notes, priority | ✓ | ✓ |
| Read the whole thread | ✓ | ✓ |
Tags, notes and priority work at any time, so you can classify or annotate a conversation the bot is handling without taking it away from the bot.
What moves a conversation between states
What closes a conversation
- An agent closes it. The normal path.
- A macro with a close action. See Macros.
- Auto-close. After the bot's last message, a timer runs (24 hours by default; 1 hour on web chat, 12 hours on social channels). When it expires the conversation closes, or — if auto-resolve is on — the bot first judges whether the issue was resolved and may send a follow-up instead. See Follow-Ups & Auto-Resolve.
Auto-close never touches a handed-off conversation. The timer is armed by a bot message and the sweep explicitly skips anything that has been handed off. Once a conversation is with your team it stays open until a person closes it — no timer will close it out from under you.
What reopens a conversation
- The customer sends a new message. Automatic.
- A snooze expires. Automatic.
- An agent replies to a closed conversation.
- A handoff, if the conversation was closed at the time.
- Manual reopen, from the conversation header.
Two exceptions to reopen-on-customer-reply are worth knowing:
- Conversations classified as spam do not reopen.
- If your business runs an external help desk, a handed-off conversation does not reopen on our side — the ticket in your help desk is the source of truth at that point.
What a reopen keeps
Everything. The assignee, the handoff state, tags, notes and history all survive closing and reopening unchanged. A reopened conversation is flagged in the inbox so you can see it came back, and it returns to whichever views its filters match — typically the same queue it left.
Snoozing
Snooze when you need a guarantee the conversation comes back to you even if the customer never replies: you are waiting on a supplier, you promised an update by Friday, or policy says someone must check in.
The durations offered in the snooze menu are configurable, and you can always pick an arbitrary date and time instead. When the snooze expires the conversation comes back and is flagged as returned from snooze. A customer message arriving during a snooze also brings it back immediately.
Snoozing does not change the assignee or the handoff state, and unsnoozing does not reopen a closed conversation — it only restores visibility.
Closing and snoozing are the only two ways a conversation leaves your open queue, and the choice between them is the whole decision:
If you can't do anything more on this conversation right now, close it. If you need to be sure you come back to it, snooze it.
Quick reference
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Is "resolved" a state? | No. Resolved means closed. |
| Can a handed-off conversation go back to the bot? | No, never. |
| Does closing remove the assignee? | No. It stays, and survives reopening. |
| Does closing end the conversation permanently? | No. A customer reply reopens it. |
| Will a handed-off conversation auto-close? | No. Only a person closes it. |
| Can I reply to a conversation the bot owns? | Not until you take it over. |