Reply to Reporters from an Issue

When the same problem is reported many times, those reports are merged onto one Issue. The Issue then carries many linked conversations, each with its own reporter — and in a cross-workspace tracker like Atender’s own, those reporters are agents sitting in many different workspaces. Answering all of them used to mean opening each linked conversation in the inbox and typing the same reply by hand, one at a time.

The Reply to reporters box does it in one action. It sits in the conversation column of the Issue page, under the conversation thread. You write one message; it lands in every conversation you pick as a normal reply from you, delivered and translated exactly as a reply you type in the inbox. Each reporter then answers in their own conversation, exactly as they would to any other reply.

Issue comments stay internal and team-only. This box is the one way out to a reporter — a word meant for the person who reported goes through here, not through a comment.

What you need

• Your workspace has the Issues module switched on.
• You hold issues.manage. The box only renders for someone who can manage Issues — the same permission that links and unlinks a conversation. With issues.view alone you can read the Issue and its conversation, but the reply box is not shown.

Where to find it

Open any Issue in the Issue Tracker. On a wide screen the Issue sits on the left and the conversation column sits beside it; on a narrower screen the conversation column stacks underneath. Reply to reporters is the last block in that column, below the conversation thread and the Conversations list.

Under the heading a line reads Your message goes to each ticked reporter as a reply in their own conversation. The box appears when the Issue has at least one linked conversation and has not been merged into another Issue:

• Nothing linked yet: the column shows No conversation yet instead, and there is no reply box. This is the same whether or not the Issue has been merged.
• The Issue is merged into another Issue and has linked conversations: in place of the box, a note reads This issue is merged into #N. Reply to every reporter there. The merge carried this Issue’s reporters over to #N, so click the number and send your reply from that Issue — it reaches all of them at once. See Merge an Issue into another Issue.

The list of reporters

Above the message field is the list of every conversation linked to the Issue, with a count over it — for example 3 conversations. Each row shows:

• A tick box, ticked by default.
• The workspace mark — on a cross-workspace Issue, the logo or short name of the workspace the report came from, so you can tell two reporters in different workspaces apart. On a single-workspace Issue there is nothing extra to show.
• The reporter’s name (or Unknown reporter when the conversation carries no contact).
• The channel the conversation is on — Email, Web chat, WhatsApp, and so on — because that is normally the channel your reply goes out on.
• via #N — when a merge carried this reporter over from another Issue, the number of that Issue.

When the list loads, every conversation you can reply to is ticked, up to the first 200. Untick any you don’t want to answer — a status question that only applies to one reporter, say — and only the ticked rows are sent.

An archived conversation is shown greyed, its tick box locked, with Archived on the right. You cannot reply into an archived conversation, so it can’t be picked; it stays in the list only so the count is honest about everything linked.

Sending the reply

1. Tick the reporters you want to answer, and untick any you don’t.
2. Write your message in the field, in English. Its placeholder reminds you: Write a reply. It is translated into each reporter’s language. When Enable translation is on in Settings → Translation, a reporter whose language is known and is not English receives it translated. Everyone else — and every reporter when translation is off — receives your text as you wrote it.
3. Optionally click Attach file to add files to the reply, up to 10. Each reporter gets its own copy of every file. The files together are capped at 25 MB, and a channel with a smaller limit shows Failed for that conversation.
4. Click Send (or press Cmd/Ctrl + Enter in the message field; the button shows the shortcut). Send is only active once the message has text and at least one conversation is ticked.

Each ticked conversation gets your message as an ordinary agent reply from you — the same delivery, the same translate-on-send, and the same side effects as a reply you’d type in the inbox. The reporter sees a normal answer in their thread and replies there.

The reply goes out on the conversation’s own channel, with two exceptions — the same ones as a reply from the inbox:

• A phone or voice conversation is answered by email when the customer has an email address and email is on for your workspace. Otherwise it goes by SMS when the customer has a phone number and SMS is on. With neither, the row shows Failed.
• A chat the customer has already left is answered by email when the customer has an email address and your workspace can send email. Otherwise the reply stays in the chat, where the customer sees it if they come back.

Results, and retrying only what failed

After you send, each row shows its outcome:

• Sent — the reply is in that conversation.
• Failed — that one conversation could not be delivered to. It shows in red. A reply that could not be translated is not sent, and shows Failed too — except on email, which is translated as the email goes out: there the row can read Sent while the email is held, and the held message in that conversation shows the failure with Try again and Send as written.
• Archived — the conversation was archived before your reply reached it, so it was skipped.

One conversation failing never stops the others; the rest still go. When no row failed, the box clears itself for a fresh message — an Archived row does not count as a failure. When some fail, your text stays and only the failed rows stay ticked — so pressing Send again retries just those, and leaves the ones already answered alone.

A repeat of the same send is safe. A double click, or pressing Send again to retry the failed rows, never delivers the message a second time to a conversation that already received it. Only the conversations that still need it are written to.

After a clean send, the box starts a new message. If you then write the same text and press Send again, it goes out again as a new reply.

What the Issue records

A send that delivers a new message to at least one conversation adds one line to the Activity section of the Issue: replied to N conversations (or 1 conversation), where N is the number of conversations that received it. A send that delivers nothing — every row failed, or it repeated a send that already went out — adds no line. The line does not repeat the message text, which lives in each conversation.

One reply may fan out to as many as 200 conversations at once. On an Issue with more linked conversations than that, the first 200 are ticked when the list loads. Send to those. When they have all gone out, the box ticks the same 200 again, so untick them, tick the rest, and send again.

Related

• How to Link a Conversation to an Issue — how a conversation becomes a linked reporter in the first place, and why the reporter’s own conversation can’t be unlinked.
• Merge an Issue into another Issue — how the reporters of duplicate Issues end up on one Issue, and why you reply from the main one.
• Notify reporters when an issue’s status changes — the automation that messages every reporter when the status changes, which is separate from a reply you write here.
• File issues via the public API — the same reply is available to an integration through reporter-conversations and reporter-replies.