Time-based automations: customer without reply, conversation without answer and idle status

When to use

• Send a reminder when the customer goes quiet after your reply (e.g., no answer in 4 hours)
• Alert the team, change the priority or reassign when the customer wrote and nobody answered within X minutes
• Resolve or reassign a conversation that has been sitting in Pending (or another status) for days
• Assign the conversation to the last human agent who talked to the customer
• Make a rule run only on private notes, or never on private notes

Prerequisites

About this article

Until now, every automation rule ran at the moment of the event (conversation created, message created, etc.). The When this rule runs field now has a second group, After a while, with three triggers that wait for a set time before acting. This article also covers two additions that apply to any rule: the Last responding agent option in the Assign Agent action and the Private Note condition.

For the basics of creating and editing rules, see How to manage automations in Cloud Chat. To understand each event, see How the events that trigger automations work.

Step by step

Step 1 — Open a new rule

Go to Settings → Automation and click Add Automation Rule. Fill in the Rule Name and the Description.

Step 2 — Pick the trigger in "When this rule runs"

The field has two groups: As soon as it happens (the usual events) and After a while, with the three new triggers:

Step 3 — Set the wait time

Next to the trigger, fill in for + number + unit (minutes, hours or days). The wait goes from 10 minutes to 30 days. Right below, a sentence explains when the clock starts for the chosen trigger.

Step 4 — Adjust the conditions

Each trigger comes with a suggested condition, which you can change:

• Customer hasn't replied → Proactive / Dispatch equal to False, so customers who only received a campaign are not chased
• No teammate has replied → Status equal to Open
• Conversation stays in a status → Status equal to Pending (change it to the status you want to watch)

Rules for each trigger:

• Customer hasn't replied and No teammate has replied accept conversation conditions (status, inbox, team, tags, priority, assignee, etc.), but not message conditions (content, message type, private note) or the "changed" operator.
• Conversation stays in a status accepts only Status and Inbox, joined by AND. Status must be Equal to a specific status (not "All").

Step 5 — Choose the actions and save

Add the actions (e.g., send a message, add a tag, resolve the conversation, assign an agent or team, send a WhatsApp template) and click Create. In the automation list, the rule shows a badge with the wait time, for example After 4 hours.

How it works

Last responding agent

New option in the Assign Agent action, available in every event (Conversation Created, Conversation Updated, Message Created, Conversation Opened, Rating (CSAT) received) and in time-based rules.

• Assigns the conversation to the agent who sent the most recent public reply.
• Ignores private notes, customer messages, campaign messages and ClaudIA replies.
• If the conversation is assigned to ClaudIA, it is not taken away from ClaudIA.
• If no human agent has replied yet, the assignee does not change.

Difference from Replying agent: that option exists only in Message Created and uses the author of the message that triggered the rule. Last responding agent looks at the conversation history, so it works in any event.

Example: Conversation Updated + Status equal to Resolved + Assignee name is not present → Assign Agent: Last responding agent. Every conversation resolved without an assignee goes to whoever last helped the customer.

Private note condition

In the Message Created event (group As soon as it happens), there is the Private Note condition, with the values True or False:

• True: the rule runs only when the message created is a private note (e.g., notify an external system by webhook whenever someone writes a note).
• False: the rule ignores private notes (e.g., a rule that reacts to team messages and should not run on internal notes).

Notes

• Checked every 5 minutes. Time-based rules are checked every 5 minutes, so the actions may run a few minutes after the exact time.
• Everything is checked again before acting. If in the meantime the customer replied, the team replied, the status changed or the conversation no longer matches the conditions, nothing happens.
• Only applies from the moment the rule is saved. Conversations that were already idle before you created the rule are not included; they start counting when the clock restarts (a new reply, a new customer message or a new status change). Editing the trigger, the wait time or the conditions, or reactivating the rule, also restarts the count.
• One run per episode. The rule runs once per customer silence, per unanswered wait or per entry into the status. For a sequence (e.g., a reminder after 4 hours and closing after 24 hours), create one rule for each step. The Customer hasn't replied count starts from the last message sent to the customer, including a reminder sent by an automation.
• Safety limit: at most 5 runs of time-based rules on the same conversation every 24 hours, to prevent rules that trigger each other in a loop.
• If you only need inactivity follow-up and closing, the built-in settings still apply: see End-to-end inactivity flow. Use time-based rules when you need your own conditions (inbox, tags, priority) or other actions.