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A conversation has exactly one owner: the assignee. Everything on this page exists because one owner is rarely the only person who needs to be involved.

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Participants watch; the assignee owns

Three ways to become a conversation participant, and what being one does. Three ways to become a conversation participant, and what being one does. Three ways to end up watching a conversation:

Someone adds you

From the participants control in the conversation header.

You are mentioned in a private note

Being mentioned adds you automatically. You do not have to accept anything.

You watch it yourself

Useful for a conversation you want to keep an eye on without taking it off whoever has it.
Once you are a participant you are notified every time anyone replies — the customer or a colleague. You can stop watching at any time from the same control, including when someone else added you.
Participant is not a claim of ownership. The assignee is still the one person accountable for the conversation. If you find yourself watching something that nobody owns, assign it rather than adding more watchers to it.
The header shows the first few participants and counts the rest. There is no limit on how many a conversation can have, though a conversation with a dozen watchers is usually a sign it wanted a team instead.

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Private notes

A private note is a message in the thread that the customer never receives. It is stored on the conversation like any other message and excluded from everything customer-facing — the widget, the email thread, the channel. Use one to leave context for whoever picks the conversation up next: what you already tried, what the customer actually wants as opposed to what they asked for, why it is taking so long.
Check which mode the composer is in before you type. The composer switches between reply and private note, and the thing that makes a private note useful — that it looks like a normal message — is the same thing that makes sending one as a reply so easy to do.

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Mentions

Typing @ in a private note offers your teammates and your teams. Mentioning someone does two things at once: it notifies them, and it adds them as a participant so they stay notified about what happens next.
Mentions only work in private notes. An @ in a public reply is just an @ — it goes to the customer as typed and notifies nobody. This is deliberate: there is no version of mentioning a colleague that should ever be visible to the person you are supporting.
There is no separate mentions inbox. A mention reaches you through your normal notifications, so the way to make mentions useful is to have those configured the way you actually work.

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Snooze

Snoozing sets a conversation aside until a moment you choose, and takes it out of your open list until then. Custom… opens a date and time picker instead of choosing for you, and it shows up in two places — the resolve dropdown and the command bar — not only this list. Every snooze also wakes early if the customer replies. A conversation that comes back — by timer or by reply — returns to open, not to whatever it was before.
Snooze is the honest version of pending. pending means you are waiting on the customer. Snooze means you have decided not to look at this until a specific moment. Using pending for both is how an inbox quietly fills with conversations nobody is actually waiting on.

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Next

Conversation views

Getting the list down to what you should be working on.

Finding a conversation

What search actually looks at, and what it does not.

Teams

When a conversation needs a group rather than a list of watchers.

Notification preferences

Which of these actually reach you, and where.