If you'd like to prevent customers responding to conversations or tickets after they've been closed, you can enable reply prevention as a setting for your workspace. Conversations and tickets each have independent reply windows — so you can set different timeframes for each.
This can help you measure your support team’s performance by the number of conversations closed.
Enable reply prevention in your settings
To set this up, go to Settings > Channels > Messenger > General > Control inbound volume. You'll find two separate sections — Conversations and Tickets — each with their own independent reply prevention toggles and day windows.
For each section, you can configure reply prevention separately for:
Users.
Visitors (this includes Leads).
For each option you can define a delay (in days). After that time limit, a conversation or ticket can no longer be replied to by a customer.
If this is switched off, customers will be able to reply to a closed conversation or ticket at any time, which will reopen it.
Why set a separate reply window for tickets?
Tickets often take longer to resolve than conversations — for example, a bug report that takes several days to fix. Previously, tickets and conversations shared the same reply window, which meant tickets could get locked before the issue was even resolved, forcing customers to start a new ticket and lose all prior context.
With independent windows, you can set a short reply window for conversations (e.g. 1 day for live chat) while giving tickets a longer window (e.g. 7–14 days) to match your resolution timelines.
Tickets reply window
The Tickets section in Settings > Channels > Messenger > General > Control inbound volume gives you dedicated controls for tickets, independent from conversations:
Separate toggles for users and visitors to enable or disable reply prevention on tickets
An independent reply window — set the number of days after which ticket replies are prevented
This means bug reports or complex issues that take several days to resolve won't get locked under the same short reply window as live chat conversations. Customers can continue the ticket thread without losing prior context.
FAQs
Can teammates reopen closed conversations?
Yes. If a teammate replies to the conversation at any point after it has been closed, it will reopen for the customer. This allows you to follow up with customers after issues have been resolved, or updates released etc.
What do customers see?
With this setting enabled, your customers will still be able to view their closed conversations in the Messenger, but won’t be able to reply directly. Instead, they’ll be encouraged to start a new conversation:
To enable this in your mobile app, you must have version 7.1.0 (or greater) of the Intercom mobile SDK (Android or iOS) installed.
Expected behavior
The feature works on web and mobile - Customers will be prevented from replying to closed conversations in the Web Messenger and Mobile SDKs.
Replies on Articles - Currently conversations started from Articles and then later closed will still be able to be re-opened.
New conversations button - When the “New Conversation” in the Messenger home is hidden, this additional “New Conversation” button in a closed conversation thread is still present and functional.
What happens to email conversations?
Email replies to closed conversations can be configured separately.
If your emails are configured to come from your teammate's individual email addresses and a customer replies directly to a teammate, the new conversation will be assigned to that teammate.
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