Most support teams aren't failing because of one big mistake — they're failing one quiet conversation at a time. A customer sends a follow-up, it lands at the bottom of someone's queue, and three days later they leave a one-star review asking why nobody replied.
If low ratings keep referencing slow or missing replies — rather than the quality of the answer itself — that's almost always an idle-conversation problem, not a knowledge problem.
If agents regularly stumble across old open conversations while searching for something else, your inbox doesn't have a reliable way to surface conversations that have gone quiet.
New conversations get picked up fast because they're visible. Older, idle ones sink — especially for agents who are already at capacity.
Snooze is meant to be temporary. If conversations regularly come back from snooze and sit untouched again, it's worth tracking how long they stay idle after that.
The clearest sign: a customer replies to their own ticket asking "any update?" — and that's the first your team hears that the conversation needed attention.
A "Conversation idle" rule alerts a teammate or channel when a conversation has been waiting longer than a threshold you choose — on the days your team actually works. It turns a silent failure into a visible one, while there's still time to fix it.