Settings, Inbox is where a few small but genuinely useful details about how your inbox behaves day to day live: the ticket number format every conversation gets, and the exact wording Arbyn uses when it checks in on a customer who's stopped responding. Auto-close timing and CSAT are covered in full in How conversations close automatically, and when CSAT is collected; this article covers what that one doesn't.
What it does
Every conversation in your inbox gets an automatically incrementing ticket number in a format you control (like CS1000, CS1001, and so on). Separately, you can customize the actual message Arbyn sends a customer who's gone quiet after it replied, and control how long your team's own handed-off conversations can sit before Arbyn nudges you about them.
Where to find it
Settings → Inbox.
Setup (step by step)
Open Settings → Inbox.
Under Ticket numbering, set a Prefix (up to 6 letters or numbers, like CS or ORD), a Starting number, and how many digits the number pads out to (3 to 7). A live preview shows exactly what your next ticket number will look like as you type.
Under Follow-up message, turn the check-in on, set how many minutes of silence trigger it (5 to 1,440), and write the actual message Arbyn sends, or leave it blank to use Arbyn's default wording.
Under When a teammate is handling it, turn on Nudge my team about stalled conversations and set how many hours a conversation your team is handling can sit untouched (1 to 168) before Arbyn emails you about it.
In the same section, turn on Remind me about escalations nobody has answered and set how many hours (1 to 168) an escalated conversation may sit unanswered before Arbyn sends a second reminder. This is a different setting from the one above; see below for why both exist.
Click Save. Ticket numbering applies going forward only, existing conversations keep the numbers they already have.
How it works
Ticket numbering is purely cosmetic, but it's permanent going forward. Every conversation gets the next number in sequence the moment it's created, formatted with your chosen prefix and padded to your chosen digit width. Changing the prefix, starting number, or digit width only affects conversations created after you save, every existing ticket keeps the number it was given at the time, so changing this setting never renumbers your history.
The follow-up message is the actual wording behind the nudge. How conversations close automatically, and when CSAT is collected explains the behavior: if Arbyn replies to a customer and they go quiet, Arbyn checks in once after a period of silence you choose, then wraps up the conversation if there's still nothing after the same wait again. This page is where you set the exact words used for that check-in, so it can match your store's voice instead of a generic default, and where you set how long "quiet" actually means before that first check-in fires.
On chat, the check-in always sends. On email, it only sends if you've written a custom message here. Arbyn won't email a customer an automated "still there?" message unless you've explicitly asked it to, since an unsolicited check-in email can read more like spam than support. A quiet email conversation still resolves on the same schedule regardless; without a custom message, it just resolves silently, with an internal note on the conversation explaining why, instead of a message the customer receives.
Team handoff nudges protect a conversation your team is actively handling from going stale. This is the same mechanism described in Escalations and handing conversations back and forth with Arbyn: once a conversation has been handed to a person and sits untouched for the window you set here, Arbyn reads the thread and drafts a suggested next step as an internal note, then emails you a nudge, never contacting the customer directly and never taking the conversation back on its own. This page is where you turn that nudge on or off and set the exact number of hours.
The unanswered-escalation reminder is a separate, second safety net, and it catches the opposite failure. The team-handoff nudge above assumes somebody has picked a conversation up and then got distracted. This one assumes nobody picked it up at all.
Arbyn always emails you the moment it hands a conversation to your team, so an escalation is never silent. But a single email at the moment of handoff is easy to miss on a busy day, and the conversation it was about then sits there with a customer waiting on the other end of it. Turn on Remind me about escalations nobody has answered, set the number of hours, and Arbyn sends one more reminder if that conversation is still unanswered when the window is up.
The two settings are completely independent and it is worth having both on. They cover the two distinct ways a handed-over conversation goes quiet: taken and forgotten, or never taken at all. Each has its own on/off switch and its own hours field, both in the range 1 to 168 hours, so you can be gentle about one and strict about the other. A common setup is a longer window for the team nudge, since somebody is demonstrably already on it, and a shorter one for the unanswered reminder, since nobody is.
Good to know
Ticket numbers never get reused or renumbered. A change here only affects future conversations; your history keeps whatever numbers it already has.
On chat, leaving the follow-up message blank uses Arbyn's own default wording, so you don't have to write custom text for the check-in to work. On email, a blank message means no check-in email is sent at all; the conversation still resolves, just silently.
The follow-up and team-handoff settings are independent. One is about a customer going quiet after Arbyn's own reply; the other is about your team sitting on a conversation they've taken over. Turning one off doesn't affect the other.
There are two team-side reminders, not one. The stalled-conversation nudge is for a conversation somebody took and then left; the unanswered-escalation reminder is for one nobody took at all. They have separate switches and separate hour settings.
The unanswered-escalation reminder is a second email, not the first. You are always emailed the moment Arbyn escalates something. This setting only decides whether a follow-up reminder is sent if that conversation is still sitting there later.
None of this touches CSAT or auto-close timing directly. Those are covered fully in their own article; this page's follow-up setting is specifically the wording and delay of the first check-in, not the later auto-close step.
FAQ
If I change my ticket prefix, do old tickets get renumbered? No. Every existing conversation keeps the number and prefix it already has. Only conversations created after you save use the new format.
Can I turn off the follow-up check-in but keep auto-close on? Yes, they're independent settings. Turning off the follow-up message just means Arbyn won't send a check-in before a conversation eventually auto-closes on its own timeline.
What happens if my team ignores a handed-off conversation past the nudge window? Arbyn drafts a suggested next step as an internal note and emails you, once. It never contacts the customer on your behalf or takes the conversation back automatically.
Does changing the follow-up delay affect email conversations too? No, there's no live "still there?" check for email in the same way; that follow-up delay is specifically for chat conversations that go quiet after Arbyn's reply.