Merging & Split
Handling support requests in Slack can quickly become overwhelming. Customers often:
Send messages in rapid bursts
Change topics mid-thread
Follow up without clear context
This fragmentation makes it difficult for support teams to track issues, prioritize responses, and maintain continuity in conversations.
To address this, ClearFeed offers two powerful conversation merging capabilities:
Rule-Based Merging
AI-Based Merging
Note that whether merging of messages is enabled for your account depends on the product edition and ticketing configuration as listed here.
Rule-Based Merging
Important: Rule-Based Merging is now deprecated and only applies to some Slack Channel Collections created before March, 2025
Rule-Based Merging uses a set of deterministic rules to decide when consecutive messages should be grouped into a single request. This ensures related updates stay together, improving context and reducing clutter.
Messages are grouped if they meet one or more of these conditions:
Same Author: Consecutive messages from the same person
Short Time Gap: Messages sent within a short window (default: 5 minutes)
Continuation Cues: Phrases like “but,” “otherwise,” or “on the other hand”
Example A customer might write in 3 different messages on a Slack Request Channel:
“Unable to access your application.”
“We’re getting a 503 error.”
““Any update on this?”
Without merging, these could appear as separate requests. With Rule-Based Merging, they’re automatically grouped, preserving context for faster and more effective responses.
AI thread merging
While Rule-Based Merging handles straightforward cases well, it can miss the subtle ways users continue conversations. ClearFeed’s AI-Based Merging enhances context tracking by applying an intelligent model on top of existing rules.
The AI model identifies when messages are contextually related—even if they're vague, delayed, or indirect.
Key capabilities include:
Pronoun & Entity References: Understands vague continuations like
“Let me check that.”
“Any update on this?
“Still investigating it.”
Indirect Continuity: Detects when a new participant joins but continues the same topic:
“Looking into this now.”
Follow-Up & Resolution Cues: Recognizes acknowledgments and contextual replies:
“Got it, that solved the issue.”
“Here’s the version: v2.1.0”
“Uploading the screenshot now.”
Urgency & Escalation Detection: Identifies urgency even when the issue isn’t restated:
Original: “We’re facing some issues with our prod cluster.”
Follow-up: “This is quite urgent, could someone please check!!!”
Important: To prevent reviving old threads unnecessarily, AI-Based Merging applies a 3-day cutoff. Any message sent more than three days after the last activity will start a new request, even if it seems related.
Merge Settings in Your ClearFeed Account
Rule-Based Merging maybe active for older collections created before March, 2025.
AI-Based Merging follows the default behavior outlined below. If you'd like to override these defaults, please contact the ClearFeed support team.
For Internal Helpdesk and Integrations product editions, AI-based merging is turned off by default.
For External Helpdesks
With automatic ticketing (whether filing Tickets to ClearFeed or External systems like Zendesk, Freshdesk et al), AI-based merging is turned off by default.
If ticketing is disabled, or manual ticketing is enabled – AI-based merging is turned on by default.
Splitting Unrelated Messages
Merging helps keep context together, but sometimes, customers report unrelated issues in a single burst. Automatically merging such messages could create confusion.
To solve this, ClearFeed supports Request Splitting. With Request Splitting, agents can manually separate unrelated messages into distinct requests. This ensures each issue:
Has its own clear thread
Can be assigned and resolved independently
Is tracked without context bleed
When You Can / Cannot Split a Message
Once a story is marked Not a Request, older DMs cannot be split—even if the story is later converted into a request.
You can split a message into a new request only if it is a parent message (not a reply).
The Split button is visible only when no ticket/task (e.g., ClearFeed, Jira, Asana) has been filed for that request.
How to Use the Split Functionality
Open the request thread in the triage channel.
On the merged customer message, look for the note and the Split button.
Click Split.
ClearFeed will create a new independent request for the messages in that thread.
The image below shows an example of request with merged messages. The Split button is shown next to the first merged message. Click on it would create a separate request out of the merged message - which would show up separately on Triage channels and ClearFeed WebApp dashboards.
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