Link a conversation to an incident from the Sidekick panel

When a customer describes a problem that matches a live incident — one in Investigating, Identified or Monitoring status, or a maintenance window that is currently in progress — Sidekick surfaces a hint card above the panel. Two clicks get the conversation linked, the customer subscribed to updates, and a reply drafted.

This is one of Sidekick’s highest-leverage features for service teams. Instead of agents handling the same outage individually across dozens of conversations, every agent recognizes the pattern at the moment of contact and responds consistently.

Before you start

• A live incident (created in Incidents) in Investigating, Identified or Monitoring status, or a maintenance window that is in progress. A scheduled-but-not-yet-started window is not matched.
• Show incident matches in Sidekick on (Settings → Sidekick → General)
• A conversation where the customer is describing the problem the incident covers
• For the subscription to work, the conversation’s contact needs an email address on file

What the hint card shows

When Sidekick matches a conversation to a live incident, the card displays:

• Incident title — the same title agents see in the incidents view
• Severity — minor, major or critical, shown as the raw value
• Status — Investigating / Identified / Monitoring / Resolved
• Match percentage — how close the customer’s message is to the incident title

The card sits above the regular Sidekick modules so the agent can’t miss it. A subtler version of the same signal also appears under the last customer message in the conversation: “Possible incident match · Open Sidekick for more”.

Steps — link the conversation

1. Open the conversation. The Sidekick panel should be visible (toggle it open if needed).
2. The incident-match card appears at the top. Read the incident title and severity to confirm it’s actually a match — Sidekick is conservative but not infallible.
3. Click Link & subscribe.

What happens:

• A link row is written joining the conversation to the incident, tagged as a Sidekick detection and stamped with the match score
• The contact’s email address is added to the incident’s subscriber list. Subscribers are emailed every update posted to the incident, not only the resolution. If the contact has no email address, the subscribe half fails and the button stays on Subscribe customer
• The button becomes Linked & subscribed once both halves succeed

No internal note is written on the conversation at this point.

Steps — send a templated reply

For a fast acknowledgment that doesn’t require thinking about the wording:

1. Click Insert reply on the hint card.
2. Sidekick drops a fixed template into the reply editor — not a generated answer. It:
   Greets the contact by first name and thanks them for reaching out
   Names the incident (avoiding implying it’s the customer’s fault)
   Links the public status page, when the tenant has one
   Asks the customer to reply “yes” if they want to be added to updates
3. Edit the draft as needed — adjust tone, add context, personalize.
4. Send.

The template exists in English, Spanish, French, German and Portuguese and follows the conversation’s detected customer language, falling back to English. Inserting it also marks the subscription as offered, so when the customer replies, Atender classifies that reply: an affirmative subscribes them and posts a Sidekick note on the conversation explaining what it did; a reply that is only a confirmation also closes the conversation as done.

You can do Link & subscribe without sending a reply, or Insert reply without subscribing. Most agents do both. Note that Insert reply replaces whatever is already in the reply editor.

When to NOT click

The card is conservative but worth verifying. Don’t link when:

• The customer is describing a different problem that happens to share keywords. (E.g., the incident is about email delivery delays; the customer is asking about email templates — different topic, similar words.)
• The customer’s issue predates the incident — they reported it before the incident started, even if the incident now affects similar customers.
• The match percentage is barely over the bar. Sidekick shows only its single best-matching incident, and only when that match reaches 50%, so a card in the 50-60% range is a weak signal, not a strong one.

Bear in mind the match is made against the incident’s title alone, not its updates or description — so a vaguely-titled incident matches loosely and a precisely-titled one can miss a customer who used different words.

If you’re unsure, ignore the card and reply normally. False-positive incident links can confuse downstream reporting and customer notifications.

Verifying the subscription worked

After clicking Link & subscribe:

• The card itself switches to Linked & subscribed, and you get a “Subscribed — Customer will receive updates about this incident” toast
• The contact’s email address appears on the incident’s subscriber list in Settings → Incidents → Subscribers
• Each update posted to the incident emails every subscriber

There is currently no screen that lists the conversations linked to an incident; the link row is written but nothing in the app reads it back.

Troubleshooting

• Symptom: Card appears but I’m sure the customer’s issue isn’t related. Fix: Dismiss it with the × on the card. That hides it for this conversation in this session only — it comes back on reload, and nothing about the match is learned from the dismissal.
• Symptom: I clicked Link & subscribe by mistake. Fix: Remove the contact from the incident’s subscriber list in Settings → Incidents → Subscribers, or have them use the unsubscribe link in the notification email. Unlinking on its own does not cancel the subscription — the two are stored separately.
• Symptom: No card appears even though I know there’s a relevant incident. Fix: Either Show incident matches in Sidekick is off (Settings → Sidekick → General), the incident isn’t live (Investigating / Identified / Monitoring, or an in-progress maintenance window), or the customer’s wording is far enough from the incident title that the match fell below 50%. Retitling the incident to match how customers describe it is the practical fix; there is no manual link action anywhere in the app.

See also

• What is Sidekick?
• Panel modules reference
• Incidents