FAQ — Customer keeps creating new conversations
A customer reaches out, you can see they were here yesterday with the same issue, but Atender treated it as brand new. Walk this list top to bottom.
1. Is detection enabled for the channel?
Open Settings → Returning Customers and click the channel the customer used. The Enabled toggle has to be on for that channel specifically. Detection is per-channel — turning it on for Email doesn’t enable it for Chat.
2. Is the threshold long enough?
Each channel has a threshold (in minutes) that defines how far back to look for previous conversations. The default is 1440 minutes (24 hours). If the customer’s previous conversation is older than that, it won’t be matched.
Bump the threshold up — 4320 (3 days), 10080 (7 days) — if your team’s typical resolution time stretches past a day.
3. Is at least one trigger enabled?
Even with detection on, a previous conversation must match a trigger to count. The triggers are:
- Trigger on unanswered conversations — customer reached out before, didn’t get a response, reaching out again
- Trigger on resolved-within-threshold — customer’s previous conversation was marked Done within the threshold
- Trigger on snoozed conversations — customer has a currently snoozed conversation
If all three are off, nothing ever matches. Most teams want all three on.
4. Is the customer being identified the same way both times?
Cross-channel detection only works when the identifier matches:
- Phone / SMS — same phone number on both sides
- Email — same email address (case-insensitive, but minor differences like a
+tagin the address can break matching) - Web Chat — session/cookie or authenticated identity
Common identifier mismatches:
- Customer used
name@gmail.comlast time andname+support@gmail.comthis time — different identifiers to many systems - Customer called from a different phone (work line yesterday, mobile today)
- Customer is signed out of your web chat today, signed in yesterday — same person, different session
- Email was forwarded by a colleague, so the inbound
From:is the colleague, not the customer
5. Is the previous conversation in a state that triggers don’t include?
Open the previous conversation. If it’s:
- Active and unsnoozed — that’s a state none of the three triggers match. The customer doesn’t have a “previous” conversation; they have an ongoing one. Returning detection isn’t the right tool here — the conversation should already be picking up new messages.
- Archived — Archived is terminal. Returning detection doesn’t reopen archived conversations by design.
If the conversation is in one of those states and that’s wrong for your workflow, the issue isn’t detection — it’s that the conversation should be in a different state.
When to escalate
If all five items check out and detection still isn’t matching, capture:
- The conversation IDs (both old and new)
- The customer’s identifier (phone / email / etc.)
- The channel
- The exact timestamps and your current threshold setting
- Screenshots of your Settings → Returning Customers configuration for that channel
Share that with your Atender support contact — those five items resolve almost every case.
Related question — auto-merge is being too aggressive
If you have auto-merge enabled and unrelated contacts are getting appended to old conversations, turn auto-merge off. Auto-merge skips the customer’s clarification, which is fine when matching is high-confidence but creates noise when it isn’t.