Force new conversations for replies to old resolved conversations

[jordan-brough]

We've asked about this briefly before, but I'm opening this discussion to discuss in detail and understand the options.

Context

We're a B2B company with fewer customers asking more questions than a typical B2C company that has more customers asking fewer questions.

Goals

To provide great service to our customers, we want to:

• Distribute incoming requests amongst our customer support team
• Measure the productivity of our customer support team

Challenge

Scenario

We think this will be challenging in this scenario:

1. A customer emails us, an agent helps them, and the agent resolves the conversation
2. After a few weeks, the customer replies to the same email thread about a different issue

Issues

If I understand correctly, that last reply from the Customer will re-open the same already-resolved conversation.
This seems like a problem in a couple ways:

• The conversation will remain assigned to the previous agent, so:
  • If the agent is offline or out of office, the request won't get routed to a more available agent
  • Customers can find a "favorite" agent and bypass our request routing and use a single email thread to always correspond with the same agent
• Because the same conversation is used:
  • Agent metrics get messed up because something that is really two separate short conversations looks like a single really long conversation (i.e. total time to resolve is incorrect)
  • The conversation thread gets long and hard to understand because it contains 2 (or many more than 2!) different requests

My example above talked about email, but I have the same questions about other methods as well, particularly the web widget. Do other types of inboxes work any differently with regard to creating new conversations for the same customer?

Possible solutions

Our current idea on a solution:
If conversations had another possible state, say "Closed", then we could set up rules that would move a conversation from "Resolved" to "Closed", and Chatwoot's logic could be updated to refuse to re-open a "Closed" conversation and instead start a new conversation that links to the previous conversation. (And keep all of this hidden from / transparent to the customer, if possible)

Deciding when to move a conversation to "Closed" seems like a hard problem to solve exactly because it's hard to be sure whether a message is a new conversation or a continuation of an old conversation. But if we were able to come up with some rules to solve the most obvious cases that could help a lot. For example, closing conversations that have been resolved for more than X days.

Thoughts?

Am correct in my assumptions above about how things will work? Are there other options I don't know about? Would y'all be open to the idea of a "Closed" state, or some other solution/s?