Handling conversations that become unsnoozed while a teammate is out of office

Hi ​@Shayla C, Good question — the "Reassign Replies" setting only catches customer-initiated activity, so unsnoozed conversations sit there silently.

For the OOO unsnooze problem:

The "If teammate has been unresponsive" workflow trigger should help here. When a snoozed conversation pops back and the OOO teammate doesn't respond within X minutes, it triggers and can reassign to a team inbox or another teammate. Set the timer shorter than however long you're comfortable leaving those conversations unattended.

If you're on the Expert plan, you can also pair this with SLA rules to track and escalate based on response time targets. Key setting: make sure the timer is shorter than your SLA tolerance for these.

One caveat: this trigger only fires if the last message was from a teammate (not a bot). So it works when teammates snooze after sending "I'll follow up" — which is usually the pattern.

Here's the full doc on these triggers: https://www.intercom.com/help/en/articles/7155449-customer-or-teammate-has-been-unresponsive

For the engineering dependency problem:

Yes — back-office tickets are the cleaner approach. Create a linked ticket for the engineering work, assign it to that team, and let the ticket track the internal dependency. The customer conversation stays snoozed until engineering resolves their ticket. When they do, you (or a workflow) can unsnooze and follow up.

Alternative: tag conversations with why they're snoozed ("waiting-customer" vs "waiting-internal"). Then your auto-close workflow can filter to only target customer-waiting conversations.

Thank you ​@Christopher Boerger! I’m going to give this a shot to see if it works for our workflow. 😁

Ah, nice — that's the cleaner solution. I overcomplicated it with workflows when the native assignment setting handles it directly.

One thing to check: This feature requires Balanced assignment on the team inbox, which is only available on the Expert plan. If you're on Advanced or below, Round robin will stop assigning new conversations to away teammates, but won't reassign existing unsnoozed ones.

Other requirements:

• Teammate must be marked Away (not just calendar OOO)
• Won't reassign if the teammate themselves unsnoozes it

If you're not on Expert, the workflow approach (using "If teammate has been unresponsive" trigger) is still an option — just more setup.

For the engineering dependency side — still think back-office tickets are the way to go there. Keeps the internal work tracked separately from the customer conversation.