Track conversation topics with Monitors

Monitors help you follow recurring topics in customer conversations, such as refund requests, cancellation intent, or product errors. Describe what you want to find in plain English, review the matching conversations, and use an automation or a Slack alert to help your team act on them.

This guide walks through a refund monitor, then shows five ways to use monitors across your team. All screenshots use sample data and example Slack channels.

Before you start

• Availability: Monitors are in early access on the Business and Enterprise Cloud plans, with up to 20 active monitors per account. They do not use Captain credits.

• Permissions: Administrators create and manage monitors, review individual matches, and configure automations and Slack alerts. Teammates with access to reports can view monitor reports.

• Self-hosted Enterprise: Your instance administrator needs to configure the OpenRouter connection in Super Admin → Installation Configs and enable Conversation Monitors for your account.

• For automations: Create any teams and labels you want the rule to use. For Slack alerts, you will also need a connected Slack workspace.

1. Create a monitor

Go to Reports → Monitors. The Your monitors tab lists your monitors and the number of matching conversations created in the last seven days.

Click Create monitor to start with your own description, or open Templates and choose a starting point. Templates cover topics such as login problems, refund requests, cancellation intent, payment failures, feature requests, and escalation requests.

For this example, choose Refund requests. You can change the template before creating the monitor:

1. Give it a clear Name, such as “Refund requests”. You can also choose an icon or emoji and a color.

2. In Which conversations should this monitor find?, describe what should match and what should be excluded. The description can contain up to 500 characters.

3. Click Preview matches to check your definition against a small sample.

4. Once you are happy with the definition, click Create monitor.

Write a useful description

Describe the customer's intent, then add boundaries that distinguish it from similar requests. For example:

A customer asks for money back on a payment they already made, including duplicate charges and refunds after cancelling. Exclude questions about the refund policy and requests for a discount.

With this definition, “I was charged twice. Please refund the duplicate payment” should match. “What is your refund policy?” should be excluded. A specific definition makes the results easier to review and the actions more predictable.

Preview matches checks up to five recent conversations from the last seven days. It is a sample, so a preview with no matches does not mean that the full scan will find none. Conversations without usable text may be excluded from the sample.

2. Review the report and matching conversations

After creation, the monitor checks conversations created in the previous seven days. It then continues checking as new public customer messages and agent replies arrive. Live checks normally use the latest five public messages with usable text, along with configured customer attributes. Historical scans and rechecks can use more conversation history, subject to context limits. Private notes are excluded.

Open the monitor to see its chart. Use the date-range control and choose Group by 1 hour, 6 hours, or 1 day to explore the pattern.

Each conversation counts once per monitor, on the date the conversation was created. If a conversation created on Monday first matches on Thursday, Monday's bar can increase. The chart counts matching conversations, not matching messages or the time an alert was sent. The same conversation can match more than one monitor.

As an administrator, click a bar to open the conversations behind that count. Select a conversation to read the full exchange and check whether it fits your definition.

Results update automatically. While a scan or recheck is running, counts can still change. If the report warns that a period was not fully checked, treat its count as incomplete.

3. Run an automation when a monitor matches

Use an automation when you want Chatwoot to take an action on a matching conversation, such as assigning a team, adding a label, changing priority, or sending a webhook.

1. Open the monitor and click Create automation below its chart.

2. Give the rule a name, such as “Route refund requests to Billing”. The Monitor Matched event and your monitor are selected for you.

3. Add optional conditions if the rule should apply only to particular inboxes, teams, or customers.

4. Add the actions. For our example, choose Assign a Team → billing and Add a Label → refunds.

5. Save the rule and check that it appears as Active under the monitor's Automations section.

You can also create a rule from Settings → Automation: choose Monitor Matched as the event, select a running monitor, and configure the conditions and actions. See the automation guide for more about conditions and actions.

For a customer message such as “I was charged twice for order #1042. Please refund the duplicate payment”, the example rule assigns the matching conversation to billing and adds the refunds label:

When does the rule run?

• A rule runs once per conversation when that monitor first finds a match from new live activity. Allow time for the monitor to evaluate the message and process the action.

• The initial historical scan, rechecks, and scans of a paused period do not run actions for older matches.

• Creating a rule after a conversation has already matched does not run the rule for that existing match.

• Messages sent by another automation can contribute to reporting, but do not start a monitor rule on their own.

Test a rule with a new sample conversation after enabling it. Check the match, the resulting team or label, and any additional conditions before relying on it for your workflow.

4. Send matching conversations to Slack

Slack alerts let the relevant team know when a monitor first matches a conversation. Configure them directly on the monitor; you do not need a separate automation rule to send a monitor alert.

Connect your Slack workspace

1. Go to Settings → Integrations → Slack, or click Connect Slack in the monitor's Slack alerts section.

2. If Slack is not connected yet, click Connect, choose your workspace, and review the requested permissions in Slack. Your workspace may require an administrator to approve the app.

3. Complete the Slack integration setup in Chatwoot. For a private channel, add the Chatwoot app to that channel in Slack before trying to select it.

The Slack integration guide covers workspace connection and adding Chatwoot to private channels.

The general Slack integration also has its own conversation sync settings. Its Two-way sync mode sends replies in synced Slack threads to customers; Alerts only keeps those discussions internal. Review this setting when connecting the workspace. The general conversation channel and the destination chosen for a monitor are separate settings.

Choose a channel for the monitor

1. Return to Reports → Monitors and open your monitor.

2. In Slack alerts, open the channel dropdown.

3. Select a destination, such as #billing-alerts. The selection saves automatically and the status changes to On. Enabling Slack alerts does not send alerts for conversations that have already matched.

An alert includes the monitor name, a link to the conversation, the contact's name, an excerpt from the latest customer message, the inbox, assignee, status, match confidence, and the monitor description. Open the conversation link to investigate and reply from Chatwoot.

Confidence represents the model’s match score, shown as a percentage. It does not guarantee that the classification is correct. For example, the refund alert could show:

Refund requests
A conversation matched this monitor.
Conversation #18 · Jamie Lee
“I was charged twice for order #1042. Please refund the duplicate payment.”
Inbox: Customer support · Status: Open · Confidence: 94%

Alerts are sent for the first match from new live activity. Historical scans do not send alerts, and later messages in the same already-matched conversation do not send repeated match alerts. To turn off alerts for a monitor, select Don't send alerts.

If a private channel is missing, add the Chatwoot app in Slack and refresh the page. If alerts stop after a channel is archived or removed, select another channel. If Chatwoot asks you to reconnect Slack, complete the connection again and check the monitor's destination.

Five common use cases

Start with one topic and review its matches before adding actions. These examples show how a description, an automation, and a Slack destination can work together.

1. Surface escalation requests

Find: Customers explicitly asking for a human agent, manager, specialist, or higher support tier because their issue remains unresolved. Exclude routine transfers and sales requests.

Act: Assign a support lead, raise the conversation priority, and notify #support-escalations so the team can review the conversation and arrange the right follow-up.

2. Follow up before a customer cancels

Find: Customers who say they intend to cancel or will not renew. Exclude seat reductions and downgrades if those are handled separately.

Act: Add a cancellation-risk label, assign Customer Success, and notify #customer-success. An account manager can read the conversation and offer a relevant follow-up.

3. Spot recurring product errors

Find: Errors, crashes, outages, or severe slowness that prevent a customer from completing a task. Exclude routine how-to questions.

Act: Assign Technical Support, raise the conversation priority, and notify #support-incidents. Review the chart for increases and inspect the conversations before deciding whether they point to the same incident.

4. Collect feature requests for product planning

Find: Requests for a capability the product does not currently offer. Exclude help using an existing feature.

Act: Add a product-feedback label and send matches to #product-feedback, or use a webhook action to pass the conversation to your feedback workflow. Review the chart and the underlying conversations together when prioritizing requests.

5. Catch missing order updates

Find: Missing order confirmations, shipping updates, or delivery notices. Exclude delivery-status questions where the customer already received the tracking email.

Act: Route matches to your operations team and notify an order-support Slack channel. Use the conversation details to distinguish a single order problem from a wider notification issue.

Keep your monitors useful

• Edit: Refine the description when matches are too broad or too narrow. Changing it clears existing matches and rechecks previously checked conversations. Skipped periods remain skipped; a paused monitor rechecks when resumed.

• Duplicate: Try a variation while keeping the original definition and results available.

• Pause: Stop checking new activity while keeping the collected results. Pausing also disables linked automations.

• Resume: Choose Check the paused period to catch up, or Start from now to skip that period. Re-enable linked automations yourself in Settings → Automation when ready.

• Delete: Remove a monitor and its results. Its conversations remain available, and linked automations are disabled.

If a monitor shows Needs attention, review the displayed error and use Retry once the cause is resolved. On self-hosted installations, an administrator may need to check the OpenRouter connection. If the shared AI classification allowance is reached, existing results remain visible while evaluations and previews wait for the reset shown in the dashboard.