When your team should close a conversation depends on what you want your reports to show. “Closed” can mean different things for different teams.
How conversation status works
Section titled “How conversation status works”- A customer’s email arrives. The status is Awaiting mailbox response.
- Your team replies. The status changes to Awaiting contact response.
- As emails go back and forth with the customer, the status keeps switching between the two.
If the latest email only includes people at your company, the status is Sent Internally.
Closing a conversation sets its status to Closed.
Choose when to close, based on your reporting
Section titled “Choose when to close, based on your reporting”To track daily volumes and handling time
Section titled “To track daily volumes and handling time”If you want to report on:
- how many conversations are closed each day, and
- how long your team takes to handle a customer query (the time for the whole thread),
your team can close the conversation after every reply, even if the query isn’t fully solved yet.
To measure true resolution time
Section titled “To measure true resolution time”If you want to report on:
- how long it takes to fully solve a conversation, and
- how many conversations are Awaiting mailbox response compared with Closed,
your team should only close a conversation once nothing more needs doing.
For example, a customer replies “thanks” and the agent doesn’t close the conversation. The status stays Awaiting mailbox response, because timetoreply assumes a reply might still be needed.
When a closed conversation gets a new email
Section titled “When a closed conversation gets a new email”If a customer or colleague emails a closed conversation:
- The status changes back to Awaiting mailbox response or Awaiting contact response, depending on who sent the last email. It can also change to Sent Internally.
- The conversation is left out of Average Time To Close until it’s closed again.
- When it’s closed again, Time To Close is worked out again, from the first email in the thread to the latest email when it was closed.
Closing with Outlook’s “Mark as complete”
Section titled “Closing with Outlook’s “Mark as complete””You can also close a conversation in Outlook by marking it as complete.
Undoing it straight away
Section titled “Undoing it straight away”If someone marks a conversation as complete and then clicks the green check mark to undo it straight away, timetoreply may not pick up the change yet. It takes 30 seconds to 3 minutes to process the latest status, so the conversation may look unchanged in your dashboards and reports for a short time.
Undoing it later
Section titled “Undoing it later”If someone undoes it after timetoreply has processed the closed status (for example, 10 minutes later), the conversation stays closed.
timetoreply only reopens a conversation when a new email arrives. This stops actions that aren’t real conversation activity, like undoing “Mark as complete” or moving an email to another folder, from reopening a conversation by mistake.