Control actions

The skeleton of a flow — where it starts, how it waits out silence, and how it wraps up.

Control actions are the bones of a flow. They don't talk to the customer or think with AI — they shape the structure: where things begin, what happens during silence, and how a conversation comes to a close. Most you'll set once and forget; the idle timer is the one you'll reach for often.

Start

Start is the proactive opener. It runs once, when a conversation opens — before the customer has typed anything — so it's the place for a greeting that welcomes someone the moment they arrive.

There's nothing to configure, and every flow has one automatically. Connect it to a Send Message to greet on open. (If a customer's very first action is to send a message, there's no "open" moment to greet, so Start is simply skipped — the message is handled by the Fallback instead.)

Start is not where you handle what the customer says. It fires before they speak. The logic that answers customer messages — your Agentic AI, your routing — belongs on the Fallback below.

Inactivity (Idle)

Inactivity waits for a stretch of customer silence, then continues the flow. It's how you respond to someone who's gone quiet — with a gentle nudge, or by wrapping things up.

Reach for it when you want to re-engage a distracted customer or auto-close a stale chat.

The settings

How long to wait — the quiet period before it fires, from 5 seconds up to 10 minutes. A minute or two suits a reminder; five to ten suits auto-closing.
Only once, or every time — fire a single reminder, or nudge again each time the customer falls silent.
Reset when they reply — the natural choice: every customer message restarts the clock, so the timer only fires after real silence.

There's a fuller walkthrough, with patterns, in Reusable flows & timing.

Resolving & Resolved

These two mark the end of a conversation's journey.

Resolving signals that the conversation is actively being wrapped up — a transition state on the way to closing.
Resolved marks it as fully handled. No further automated steps run, your inbox stays tidy, and the full history is kept. If the customer messages again later, a fresh flow begins.

Neither needs much configuration. Use Resolved as the clean ending of a successful flow — after the agent has answered, after a handoff wraps up, or after an idle timer decides a quiet chat is done.

Resolving a conversation never deletes anything. It simply closes the loop and clears it from the active queue. The customer can always come back, and their history is right there waiting.

Fallback

Fallback is the main handler for what a customer says. When someone sends a message and the flow isn't already waiting for a specific answer, their message lands here. Despite the name, this is not an edge case — it's the default path for customer messages, and it's where most of your flow's logic lives.

This is where you connect your Agentic AI, or a User Intent block that routes different requests different ways, or a Reply From Documents that answers from your knowledge. When in doubt, if it responds to what the customer typed, it hangs off the Fallback.

The Fallback also catches anything the flow doesn't have a more specific next step for — so it doubles as a safety net, making sure a customer never hits a dead end.

Putting control actions to work

On their own these are quiet building blocks, but together they give a flow its shape: Start greets on open, Fallback handles what the customer says, Inactivity covers the lulls, and Resolved closes things cleanly. Get these right and everything in between has a solid frame to hang on.