What happens when a customer replies to a Done conversation?
The short answer: the conversation reopens. A customer message on a conversation that’s been marked Done flips its status back to Active and brings it back into your team’s queues. Done is not terminal — that’s the whole point of the Done-before-Archived two-step.
This page covers what happens in detail, and where the line is between “reopens” and “doesn’t reopen.”
Reply to a Done conversation
When a customer replies to a conversation whose status is Done:
- Status flips back to Active — The conversation comes out of the Done tab and back into your team’s active views.
- Engagement flips to Pending — The ball is in your court — a customer just sent something and your team hasn’t responded yet.
- The Auto-Archiving timer resets — The conversation is no longer Done, so it’s no longer counting down toward Archive. If you mark it Done again later, the timer starts over.
- The original thread is preserved — The reply lands on the same conversation with full history intact. The customer doesn’t see anything different from their side.
- Any AI handling that was deactivated stays deactivated — Marking Done deactivates AI handling. The reopen doesn’t automatically re-engage AI — a human or a rule needs to bring it back.
This is what makes Done useful. Your team can clear something out of their active queue with confidence, knowing that the customer can still come back without having to start over.
Reply to an Archived conversation
When a customer’s message would land on a conversation whose status is Archived:
- The archived conversation stays archived — Archived is terminal. No replies are added to it, and no status change occurs.
- A new conversation is created — The customer’s message arrives in your team’s inbox as a fresh conversation with its own ID, history, and lifecycle.
- For web chat — The widget treats this as a new session. The customer sees a clean chat window rather than the archived thread.
- For email — The reply still references the original thread on the email side, but in Atender it lands as a new conversation tied to the same contact.
The new conversation has the contact attached, so your agents can see the full history through the contact’s record even though the new conversation starts fresh.
Why the difference?
The reason Atender separates Done from Archived is exactly so this difference exists:
- Done is a courtesy window. “I think we’re finished here, but the door’s still open if you need anything else.”
- Archived is a clean break. “This conversation is closed. New questions are new conversations.”
If everything closed straight to a locked state, every follow-up question would lose its context. If nothing ever locked, your inbox would slowly fill with conversations that never quite ended. The two-step gives you both.
How long does the reopen window stay open?
As long as your tenant’s Auto-Archiving timer says it does. The window is controlled in Settings → Conversation resolution. See Set up auto-archiving for the timing semantics — short version, it’s measured in business hours per your team’s opening hours, not wall-clock.
Will the customer be notified that their conversation reopened?
No — there’s no notification to the customer when a Done conversation flips back to Active. From their perspective, they sent a reply and it went through. The status change is internal bookkeeping that affects your team’s queues.
Can I tell from the conversation that it was reopened?
The conversation timeline records the customer’s reply event, and the status badge in the header shows the current status. There isn’t a dedicated “reopened” marker in the UI today, but the message timestamps and status history make the sequence clear.