Open conversations with no admin reply yet, waiting_since older than the first-response SLA.
At a glance
Unanswered (awaiting first reply) is the urgent slice of Blitz’s backlog: open conversations where no agent has replied yet and the customer has now been waiting longer than your first-response SLA. These are the people forming their first impression of your support — staring at silence. Every one of them is actively breaching SLA right now, so unlike the broader Open Conversations count, the healthy reading here is zero. When this number is anything but zero, someone is waiting too long and the clock is still running.
Calculation
Vortex IQ queries open conversations and keeps only those that have received no admin reply —conversation.statistics.first_admin_reply_at is still null. For each, it measures how long the customer has been waiting (waiting_since, set when the customer last sent a message awaiting a reply) against your configured first-response SLA, honouring your Intercom office hours. Any conversation past that target is counted. Operator/bot messages and notes do not count as a first reply; only a genuine admin reply stops the clock.
Worked example
A representative reading of Unanswered (awaiting first reply) for Blitz first thing in the morning. The card shows 4 and the alert is red. The first-response SLA is 1 hour during office hours. The support lead opens the four conversations: three came in at 6am before the team logged on and have now waited two hours, and one slipped through assigned to an agent who called in sick. The lead replies to the three overnight ones with a quick acknowledgement (stopping each clock) and reassigns the orphaned conversation to herself. The count drops to zero. The pattern — overnight arrivals breaching before the shift starts — points to either an earlier start or an out-of-hours auto-reply, which the lead sets up so the clock does not start counting against an empty office. To see how often this happens, open First-Response SLA Attainment; to find the breaching conversations grouped by cause, ask Ask Viq “which conversations are past their first-response SLA right now?”Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Intercom’s own dashboard: In the Inbox, filter the Open folder to conversations with no reply, or use the Unassigned / Waiting on us views if your workspace has them. For the trend, Reports → Conversations → First response time and any first-response SLA report show how often replies missed target. Intercom’s live inbox does not always surface a single “breaching first reply” count, which is exactly what this card isolates. Why the Vortex IQ value may legitimately differ:
Cross-connector reconciliation: when a high-LTV shopper is among those waiting, High-Value Customer Waiting flags it for priority handling if a commerce sibling is connected. For divergence investigations, use Vortex Mind.