Snooze a conversation

Park a conversation until a specific time so it disappears from your Active inbox and reappears when you need it. Snoozes return when the timer expires OR the customer replies — whichever happens first — so you never miss a customer who writes back early.

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Snooze a conversation

Snoozing parks a conversation out of your Active inbox until you need it again. It’s the right move when you’re waiting on something — the customer to try a fix, a colleague to investigate, a scheduled follow-up time to arrive.

When to snooze

  • Customer is testing a fix you suggested — A few hours
  • Waiting on a teammate or specialist — Half a day or until tomorrow
  • Scheduled follow-up (“check in next week”) — The exact day / time
  • Customer is asleep (different timezone) — Until their morning
  • You promised an update by Friday — Until Friday

If you find yourself snoozing for “indefinite” reasons — “in case they come back later” — that’s usually a sign you should mark Done instead. Done already handles “in case they come back” for you.

How to snooze

  1. Open the conversation
  2. Press Z (or click the Snooze button)
  3. Choose a duration:
    Pick a quick preset (1 hour, 4 hours, tomorrow, next Monday)
    Type a natural-language duration: 3 days, tomorrow morning, next Friday at 10am
  4. Confirm

The conversation moves to the Snoozed tab and disappears from your Active queue.

Two ways snooze ends — whichever comes first

Snoozes don’t lock the customer out. Two triggers bring the conversation back to Active:

  1. Timer expires — the snooze window you set runs out
  2. Customer replies — they send a new message

Whichever happens first. So if you snooze a conversation for 3 days and the customer writes back in 30 minutes, the conversation is back in your Active queue immediately. You don’t miss them.

This is the key difference between a snooze and a “schedule message later” feature in other tools — snooze is about waiting, and the customer always wins.

Natural-language durations

The snooze input accepts loose phrasing:

  • 1 hour — One hour from now
  • tomorrow morning — Tomorrow at the start of your day
  • next Monday — Next Monday at the start of your day
  • 3 days — 72 hours from now
  • Friday 4pm — This Friday at 4pm (or next Friday if it’s already past)
  • end of day — Today at end-of-day in your timezone

Times use your account timezone unless you specify otherwise.

Where snoozed conversations live

In the Snoozed tab. The list shows:

  • The original conversation row
  • A countdown / “snoozed until” timestamp
  • Who snoozed it and when

You can still open snoozed conversations to read or add internal notes. If you reply, the conversation is brought back to Active automatically (your reply implies you’re handling it now).

Cancelling a snooze

Three ways to bring a snoozed conversation back early:

  1. Open it and click Wake up (or press the snooze toggle)
  2. Reply to it — your reply automatically wakes it
  3. Bulk select in the Snoozed tab and choose Wake up

Patterns for using snooze well

The follow-up hook

When you reply with “Try X and let me know” — snooze for a sensible window (24-48 hours). If the customer comes back sooner, great. If they don’t, the conversation reappears as a reminder to follow up.

The waiting-on-team handoff

When a specialist team needs to investigate, snooze for the SLA window you have with that team. The conversation reappears as your reminder to chase if they haven’t responded.

The customer-is-asleep timer

Customer wrote at 11pm their time and you’re answering during your morning. Snooze the reply until their workday starts so it doesn’t ping them at 4am.

Snooze and SLA

How an SLA policy treats a snoozed conversation depends on the policy’s pause rules — most teams configure SLA to pause when the ball is out of their court. Check your specific policy in SLA risk states before assuming snooze stops the clock.

Either way, snooze is for waiting, not hiding. A conversation that needs an answer doesn’t get easier to handle because the snooze timer has hidden it for a few days.

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