Follow-up nudges

Some customers go quiet after your team replies. Follow-up nudges spot those conversations and draft a short, friendly check-in asking whether the customer still needs help, so nobody has to remember to chase. Like every draft, the nudge waits unsent for someone on your team to send.

What a nudge needs

Nudges need a connected help desk and your Anthropic API key. They do not need a documentation source: a nudge is written from the conversation itself, not from your knowledge base, so nudges start as soon as your key is saved, before you have pointed Overdesk at your docs.

The Follow-up nudges job runs daily at 09:00 in your workspace's timezone. You can change the time or pause it on Schedules. See Schedules.

Which conversations get a nudge

A conversation gets a nudge when all of this is true:

• It is pending in your help desk, waiting on the customer.
• It is in an inbox the job may work in. With Allowed inboxes empty, that is every inbox. See Allowed inboxes.
• It was updated in the last 30 days.
• Someone on your team has replied, and that reply is at least 3 days old.
• It is not tagged waiting-for-release. Add that tag to any conversation you are holding until a fix ships.
• It has not been nudged before. If your drafts arrive as draft replies, no unsent reply is already waiting in the composer either.
• A quick check by the model does not find the conversation already resolved.

Each run works through up to 50 conversations across your help desks.

What arrives

The nudge arrives the same way your reply drafts do: as an internal note headed "AI Follow-Up" by default, or as an unsent draft reply on Help Scout and FreeScout if you have chosen that. See Where drafts go. Overdesk also tags the conversation ai-followup.

Nudges are written with your drafting model and follow your settings on Customize AI, so the tone and rules you set for replies apply to them too. See Customize AI.

One nudge per conversation

Overdesk nudges a conversation once. It keeps its own record, so deleting the note or sending the nudge does not bring the conversation back for a second one.

What stops nudges

• Pausing the workspace in Guardrails → Send mode stops nudges along with reply drafts.
• Pausing the Follow-up nudges row on Schedules stops nudges and leaves drafting running.

Nudges never go to the customer on their own. A person reads each one and decides whether to send it. The one exception is a nudge placed as a FreeScout draft reply on an API and Webhooks module older than 1.0.103, which may send it: see Where drafts go.