Statuses, views and the clock
A support queue is the ordered list of customer requests waiting on your team. Open items are the ones waiting on a reply; Pending and Closed are tracked statuses, and the Mine view also shows your Pending items so you can follow up:
- Open: the customer sent the last message and no teammate has replied since.
- Pending: a teammate replied, and the next step is the customer’s or internal.
- Closed: finished. A new customer message reopens it.
The tool that stores these items, owners and statuses is a shared inbox or ticket system; the queue is its list. Three views cover most days:
- Unassigned: Open items with no owner, oldest first. With a first-response target of 2 business hours (an example), anything older needs an owner now.
- Mine: your Open and Pending items.
- Near deadline: owned items due inside a window such as 60 minutes. Name the clock in the label. Deadlines come from your service-level agreement rules.
Clock rules to define, as these are your choices: the clock starts at the customer message time, not when someone saw it; it pauses in Pending; and only configured business hours count. Example: a message at 16:30 on Friday with a 2 business hour target and 9:00 to 17:00 hours is due Monday 10:30.
How a Slack Connect thread becomes an item
An item is one thread, identified by channel ID plus the parent message’s ts. These are recommended rules, not Slack behavior:
- A teammate’s reply sets Pending. Decide human versus automated by author ID against your team list, never by display name. Reactions and auto-replies do not change state.
- A customer message in a Closed thread reopens it, to its last owner or to Unassigned if that owner left.
- Two requests in one thread: a person splits one into a linked item. The same issue in two channels: a person merges them. Nothing does this automatically.
- Edits change text only. If a customer deletes the last message, recompute from what remains; if the parent is deleted, close the item with a note.
- A silent customer gets Pending, then a closing message after your chosen days.
Scope comes from the channel_shared and channel_unshared events, which the Slack Connect developer docs say apps can subscribe to. On channel_unshared, mark open items orphaned and keep their history. As of 2026, a channel can host up to 250 organizations on paid plans, and only the owning organization can remove others, so a customer-owned channel can disappear from your side without notice.
Weft is one tool that shows shared channels and email as a single queue, with replies posted under the replier’s own name.
Agents and the refresh rule
The docs say an app in a shared channel receives events from external users. Reading thread history through conversations.replies needs history scopes such as channels:history, and limits depend on app type. Internal customer-built apps keep 50+ requests per minute, but new non-Marketplace apps since May 29, 2025 get 1 per minute and 15 messages per call. Subscribe to events and refresh only changed threads. A workable default: the agent drafts, a person sends. See the shared inbox best practices guide for claim timers.