Support and inbox FAQ
Questions about conversations, channels, support modes, live chat, and SLA.
Answers about the day-to-day of working support in Hark.
What is the difference between a conversation's state and its support mode?
The state is a coarse triage bucket (open, pending, snoozed, closed) that the inbox filters on. The support mode is the fine-grained truth of who is serving the customer right now (the AI bot, a flow, the live queue, an agent, an async ticket, and so on). The mode drives the state. See Support modes and states.
Can a chat start with a bot and end with a person?
Yes, and it stays one conversation the whole way. It can begin with the AI bot or a flow, escalate into the live queue, go live with an agent, and settle into a ticket, without ever becoming a second record. A structured handoff package means the agent does not make the customer repeat themselves.
How does the live queue decide who gets a chat?
An escalated chat enters the queue and is reserved for one eligible, available agent to accept. Eligibility respects the agent's skills, languages, and concurrency limit; the team's routing strategy (balanced, round robin, or manual claim) and priority routing decide the order. If nobody accepts, or a team's limits are exceeded, the chat requeues or overflows to another team.
What is anti-cherry-pick?
It is a set of guardrails that stop agents from skimming only the easy chats: declines are recorded, an entry is not immediately re-offered to the agent who declined it, a team can require a decline reason and cap consecutive declines, and a team can hide the shared queue so agents only see chats reserved for them.
Why did my SLA timer not breach when I expected?
Two reasons are common. First, if the SLA policy is attached to an office-hours calendar, only business hours count, so a target does not tick outside your open hours. Second, the clock pauses while you are waiting on the customer and resumes with the lost business time added back, so a slow customer reply does not breach your target.
Can I save the filters I use every day?
Yes. Save any inbox filter and sort as a view. Shared views are visible to the whole workspace; personal views are yours alone. See SLA views and saved views.