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FAQ — Customer keeps creating new conversations

If a returning customer is starting fresh threads instead of being recognized, walk these five checks. The most common cause is a mismatched identifier.

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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 Enable for this channel toggle has to be on for that channel specifically. Detection is per-channel — turning it on for Email doesn’t enable it for Web chat.

2. Is the threshold relevant for this case?

Each channel has a threshold (the Lookback window, set in days and hours), but it only limits one kind of match: previous conversations that were marked Done recently. The default is 1 day (24 hours), so Recently resolved conversations only matches conversations resolved in the last 24 hours.

The threshold doesn’t limit still-unanswered conversations or currently snoozed conversations. Those are controlled by their own triggers.

Bump the threshold up — 3 days, 7 days — if customers often come back after their previous conversation was already marked Done more than a day ago.

3. Is at least one trigger enabled?

Even with detection on, a previous conversation must match a trigger to count. The triggers are:

  • Unanswered conversations — customer reached out before, didn’t get a response, reaching out again
  • Recently resolved conversations — customer’s previous conversation was marked Done within the threshold
  • 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 +tag in the address can break matching)
  • Web Chat — session/cookie, authenticated identity, or verified identity. A typed email address is not proof of identity by itself.

For Web Chat, if the customer is not authenticated and the human team is closed, they may need to use the verification link sent by email before Atender can treat that email as their identity.

Common identifier mismatches:

  • Customer used name@gmail.com last time and name+support@gmail.com this 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
  • Customer typed an email into Web Chat but didn’t verify it — typed email alone isn’t enough to prove identity
  • 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, unsnoozed and answered by an agent (no customer message since the agent’s last reply) — 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
  • For Web Chat cases, whether the routed team was open or closed when the customer reached out

Share that with your Atender support contact — those five items resolve almost every case.

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.

See also

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