Activity filters look after discussions that have gone quiet. When an open discussion has had no activity for as long as you choose, Tender can:
- return it to pending, so it's back in front of your team,
- set it private,
- close it, or
- add it to a queue, such as "Follow up".
It's a safety net. Say you tell a customer you're looking into something, and then nobody gets back to them: an activity filter that returns quiet discussions to pending after three days makes sure the discussion comes back to you. Or close discussions after a few weeks when the customer hasn't replied to your answer.
Setting up a filter
In your dashboard, open Account & Settings › Settings and click Activity Filters in the sidebar.
Each row is one action. Click Enable beside it, enter how long a discussion must be inactive (a number of hours, days or weeks, at least one hour), and click Update filters. For Add discussions to a queue, pick the queue too; once you've set one up, a new row lets you add another queue filter.
Before anything changes, Tender shows what the filter will do: roughly how many of your existing discussions are already inactive for that long, with a sample of them. Click the button at the bottom to confirm. Those discussions are then processed straight away (this can take a few minutes), and from then on the filter runs by itself.
To change how long a filter waits, edit its number and click Update filters. To turn a filter off, click Disable beside it and click Update filters.
How filters decide
- Only open discussions (and ticketed ones, if you use a ticket tracker) are touched. Closed discussions are left alone.
- The time counts from the discussion's last activity that customers can see, such as a reply from either side. Internal notes don't count, so a supporter's note doesn't keep a discussion "active".
- Each filter keeps its own clock for each discussion, so two filters can act on the same discussion without getting in each other's way, and a filter doesn't act on the same discussion again until it's been inactive that long once more.
- Each time a filter acts, it adds a note to the discussion that only staff see, such as "Automatic activity: Close after 3 week activity timeout."
Dealing with the backlog
The first time you turn a filter on, every discussion that's already inactive for that long is processed. If you have a lot of old open discussions, that can be a lot at once: returning hundreds of old discussions to pending won't help anyone.
To start fresh, set up the gentler filter first, for example Add discussions to a queue after a month, then go through that queue and close what's done before you turn on a filter that returns discussions to pending. Adding the backlog to a queue doesn't email the queue's subscribers; later additions do, as usual.
Activity filters depend on your plan: if Activity Filters isn't in your settings, see Account & Settings › Plans & Billing.