Create a side conversation

You need to talk to someone outside this conversation — engineering, a vendor, finance — without involving the customer. Side conversations are the dedicated channel for that.

Before you start

• The conversation you want to attach the side thread to must be open in front of you
• For Slack side conversations, your tenant needs Slack connected (Settings → Integrations → Slack)
• For email side conversations, no extra setup — Atender picks the From address for you, from the parent conversation (see Which address it sends from)

Steps

1. Open the customer conversation you want to attach the side thread to.
2. Open the Side Conversations panel from the right rail.
3. Click New Side Conversation.
4. Choose the channel: Email or Slack.
5. Fill in the recipient and message.

For email

• Recipient Email — the external address you’re writing to
• Recipient Name (Optional) — a display name for that recipient
• Cc — additional addresses to copy. Empty by default. This is a free-form address list, not a “copy the customer” switch: if you want the customer to see the thread, add their address here yourself
• Subject — starts empty. It is not pre-filled from the customer conversation, so give the recipient something they’ll recognise
• Message — your first message in the thread
• Include conversation history — on by default. Appends customer-safe context from the parent conversation (up to the last 50 messages) below your message. Internal notes, system-only messages, voice transcripts, and voicemails are not included in the emailed history. Full voice transcripts still belong in conversation export, not side-conversation email history. Turn it off if the recipient should receive only your new message

For Slack

• Direct Message, Group, or Channel — pick one
• Recipient — pick a Slack user (or two or more users for a Group) or a channel from the picker
• Subject and Message — your first message in the thread

6. Click Send — or Send via Slack on the Slack tab.

The side conversation appears in the panel, and the recipient is notified through their channel. Replies come back into the same panel — you respond inside Atender, the recipient sees them in their email or Slack.

Which address it sends from

There is no From picker on a side conversation. Atender resolves the address from the parent conversation, so the side thread goes out from an inbox that can actually receive the reply. In order:

1. The parent conversation’s own email channel, when it arrived on one and that channel is still active. If the customer’s market is known reliably and the bound inbox doesn’t serve it, Atender prefers a sibling inbox of the same agent stack that does.
2. The channel the parent conversation originally arrived on, if it has since been re-routed to a different one.
3. The parent’s team inbox — the team’s configured default outbound channel, or the team’s newest active inbox if there’s no default or the default isn’t sendable. This is the case that matters for a parent that started on phone, webform, or web chat, where there is no email channel of its own.
4. The tenant’s active outbound domain, only if none of the above resolves.

At every step the candidate has to be genuinely sendable — an active channel and an active outbound sending domain. A disabled channel or a decommissioned domain is skipped rather than used, because an address with no inbound routing would strand the recipient’s reply.

The name on the email is different from the address: it’s the display name of the agent who opened the side conversation, so the recipient sees a person rather than an inbox. Where quoted history includes AI turns, those are attributed to the tenant’s support name instead — the internal agent-stack label never leaves Atender.

Side-conversation emails carry no Reply-To. The recipient’s reply goes back to the From address itself, which is exactly why that address has to be a receivable one.

Note: if you address a side conversation to one of your own tenant’s email channels, Atender treats it as an internal escalation instead. It creates a linked conversation in that channel’s team queue and mirrors the messages in-app — no outbound email is sent at all.

Verify it worked

• The new side conversation appears in the Side Conversations panel
• For email: the recipient should receive a real email, sent from the address resolved above — usually the parent conversation’s own inbox or its team inbox
• For Slack: the recipient should see a notification in Slack
• The customer-facing thread is unchanged — the customer sees nothing unless you added their address to Cc

Patterns

• Engineering escalation — Slack channel, e.g. #oncall. Drop a link to the conversation and a brief summary of the issue.
• Vendor follow-up — Email to the vendor. Don’t CC the customer initially; bring them in only when the vendor has a concrete answer.
• Internal approval — Slack DM to a manager. “Customer wants a $200 refund — approve?”
• Cross-team handoff — Email to a team that doesn’t use Atender. Their reply lands in the side panel.

Troubleshooting

• Symptom: Slack side conversation never reaches the recipient. Fix: Check Settings → Integrations → Slack. Confirm the workspace is connected and the recipient is a member.

• Symptom: Email reply doesn’t appear in the panel. Fix: Ask the recipient to use reply on the original email rather than composing a new one. Matching is done on the email’s threading headers, not on who sent it — a genuine reply still matches even if it comes from a colleague’s address, but a fresh email composed from scratch has no threading headers and won’t be matched to the side conversation, even from the original recipient.

• Symptom: The email went out from an address I didn’t expect. Fix: That address comes from the parent conversation, not from the side conversation — see Which address it sends from. The usual cause is a parent that arrived on a non-email channel, so the sender fell through to the team’s inbox; the next is a parent whose own channel or sending domain has been disabled, which makes Atender skip it.

• Symptom: I want to bring the customer in mid-thread. Fix: Open the side conversation and add the customer’s address to its Cc list — the CC control sits in the side-conversation header. From then on they’re copied on the thread. Addresses that appear on an inbound reply are merged into the CC list automatically, so the list can grow on its own as the recipient loops colleagues in.

See also

• Side conversations
• Add internal comments
• The conversation detail panels