Resuming and abandonment
Last updated: April 17, 2026
Life interrupts things. A customer starts leaving a review, gets a phone call, closes the tab. This page covers what happens next — and what happens if they never come back.
Resuming an in-progress conversation
If a customer revisits the original review link, they pick up exactly where they left off. The chat restores:
- All the messages they exchanged with the bot
- Their draft (if one’s been built)
- Their star rating, if they set one
- Their name and email, if they entered them
- Any photos they attached
They don’t need to re-authenticate or re-verify anything. The link itself is the credential.
This works for both review request emails and widget links. A customer can even open the link on a different device — if they have the URL, they can come back.
The 24-hour window
Conversations stay open for up to 24 hours from when they started. A customer can resume at any point during that window — even if they’ve been away for most of it — as long as they use the original link.
After 24 hours from start, BetterReviews marks the conversation abandoned. Once that happens, the link stops resuming. If the customer clicks it again, they’ll start a fresh conversation (or hit an error, depending on the flow).
What abandoned means for you
- It doesn’t count toward your conversation quota. Billing aligns with submitted reviews, not started ones. Abandoned conversations are free.
- The draft is gone. We don’t surface unsubmitted reviews anywhere in your admin. If the customer wrote something brilliant but didn’t hit submit, it’s treated as “never happened.”
- Any photos they uploaded stay in storage but are never shown. They don’t appear in your widget, your moderation queue, or any other view.
What stays, even on abandon
Two things persist beyond the conversation:
Support requests. If the customer submitted a support request mid-conversation (via the support card), you already received that email the moment they submitted. The conversation abandoning later doesn’t undo the support flow.
Completed reviews. Abandonment only applies to conversations that never reached submit. Once a review is submitted, the conversation is marked complete and lives in your Reviews tab like any other.
Why we don’t chase
Why it works this way: we could send a reminder email after 12 hours of inactivity — “hey, want to finish your review?” — but that consistently reads as spammy and doesn’t recover most conversations. If a customer walked away, they walked away. Sending them back into the chat against their will is a bad trade for the small percentage that come back.
The 24-hour window is long enough to cover someone who stepped away for the afternoon, short enough that stale conversations don’t pile up in your data.