Use Conversation Lock to Prevent Re-opening Old Conversations

Have you ever had a customer reply to an ancient conversation? Conversation lock prevents new updates to old conversations. This keeps old conversations from surfacing to the top of the queue again. 

How it Works

Define a set number of days that a conversation should allow for updates on Closed conversations. Any new replies to a conversation after the number of days set will create a brand new conversation, instead of adding the new customer reply to the old conversation.

This applies to conversations that have a Closed status.

Administrators can set or change the value at Manage > Company. Find the Conversation Lock option and set the number of days. Set the number of days to 0 to disable the conversation lock entirely.

A small notification with a link to the original conversation will appear at the bottom of the new conversation to alert your team that this is a new reply to an old conversation.

Use Case Scenario 

• Your customer starts a conversation on January 1st.
• One of your Help Scout users replies and closes the conversation on January 2nd.
• The customer replies to the same conversation on March 1st.

With the Conversation Lock value set to 30 days, the customer reply on March 1st would create a brand new conversation in Help Scout.

Without the Conversation Lock, the customer reply would have updated and re-opened the original conversation from January 1st, causing that conversation to appear as Active again in the queue and reports. 

Common Questions

We have a conversation that's locked but it's within the time range we've set. What happened?

Help Scout automatically locks conversations with more than 100 threads (user and customer replies) to ensure you don't experience performance problems with a super long conversation.

You'll want to continue on that new conversation instead after that point.