Parallel Conversations: Trigger Another Department Without Leaving the Support

When to Use

• The agent needs the finance, legal, back office, or any other department to resolve the customer's case.
• You want the request to this department to have status and owner — it’s not enough for someone to respond; the department needs to resolve it.
• The agreement with the other department must be recorded within the support ticket, not in a loose email or message group.
• The department you need to trigger does not use Cloud Chat and can only be reached via email.

The end customer never sees a parallel conversation.

Prerequisites

The feature is active on your account, but neither channel works before being configured:

• Internal sub-ticket — you need to create at least one inbox of type Parallel Conversation, one for each department to be triggered.
• Email — you need to choose which email inbox the triggers will be sent from.

How It Works

What is a parallel conversation

It is a separate conversation, created from a support ticket, to communicate with another department within the company. It has its own status, appears linked to the original ticket, and is invisible to the customer.

As long as a parallel conversation remains open, the original support ticket cannot be resolved — the message displayed is "Resolve parallel conversations first", with the number of each.

The two channels

Who sees what

• End customer: nothing.
• You, who opened: sees the conversation with the Requester View — message exchanges and response field. You do not enter the department's queue nor see their other tickets.
• Triggered department: sees the full conversation, with status, responsible person, and history.

Step-by-step

Step 1 — Open the panel

In the support ticket, on the right panel, open the Parallel Conversations section. It shows the count in parentheses if any exist. If none, it displays "No parallel conversations yet."

Step 2 — Create the trigger

Click + Create New. Choose the channel:

Internal sub-ticket

1. In Recipient, select the department's inbox.
2. In Person (optional), choose a specific individual — or leave blank for the request to go to the team queue.
3. In Request, write what you need.
4. The AI-generated summary appears ready. Review, regenerate, or discard.
5. Use Attach to include files and click Send.

Email

1. In To, search for a contact or enter the email address.
2. In Request, write what you need.
3. If you want to include the AI summary, check Include AI summary in email. It is unchecked by default, as the summary will be inside the email body and may contain customer data.
4. Use Attach and click Send.

Step 3 — Monitor

The parallel conversation appears in the panel with the Waiting label. When the other department responds:

• an orange dot appears on the card, indicating New response;
• a record is added to the original ticket's history.

Click the card to open the conversation and reply. Back-and-forth exchanges are unlimited across both channels.

Step 4 — Close

• Internal sub-ticket: the triggered department marks the conversation as resolved.
• Email: you read the response and mark as resolved — email respondents cannot change the status.

The label changes to Resolved, and the original ticket is free to be closed. If the response did not resolve the issue, simply reopen the parallel conversation.

Configuration (administrators only)

Create a department inbox

In Settings → Inboxes → Add inbox, select Parallel Conversation, name the department, and add its agents. Each department to be triggered needs its own inbox.

Enable email channel

In Account Settings → Parallel Conversations, under Email, choose which email inbox the triggers will be sent from. The default is None — until set, the email channel is unavailable to agents.

Allow closing the original ticket

In each parallel conversation inbox settings, there is an option Allow resolving the original conversation with open parallels. It is off by default — meaning the original ticket remains locked until all parallels are resolved.

SLA pause

While there are pending parallel conversations, the SLA of the original ticket is paused and resumes when the last is resolved. The history records both events.

The first response is an exception: if the agent has not yet responded to the customer, this timer continues.

To disable, go to Settings → SLA and adjust Pause SLA while waiting for parallel conversations in the desired policy.

Notes

• How the department knows it was triggered. If you assign a person, they receive a notification in Cloud Chat. If you assign only to the team, the request enters the queue without individual notification — someone must monitor the queue. No email or browser notification is sent.
• Where to find parallel conversations. Only in the Parallel Conversations item in the sidebar menu. They do not appear in regular conversation lists.
• Customer satisfaction surveys, automatic resolution, and follow-up are never triggered in a parallel conversation.
• Reports. Parallel conversations are included in reports by inbox. To exclude internal work from metrics, remove parallel inboxes from filters.
• Customer data identification. Internal parallel conversations do not load customer data. Context is provided by what you write in the request and the AI summary — describe the case clearly.
• There is no limit to the number of parallel conversations per ticket.