Understand how Zing timeout lengths affect the behavior of automations in your service.

When a Zing has been initiated, the reply box will appear grayed out with a banner indicating that a Zing is running.

The timeout of a Zing is configured from the Zing menu.

From here, choose the amount of time for the Zing to stay in automation before timing out.

In the example highlighted in the screenshot above, a Checkout Survey Zing has been configured to survey all hotel guests checking out of the hotel on a daily basis. After initiating the survey, the Zing will "sit" waiting for a response. If no action occurs within the set time frame of 24 hours, the Zing will time out.

Zings can be configured to take actions once the timeout threshold has been met. This can be used to create actions if the contact is unresponsive or has not completed steps in the Zing in the allotted amount of time. Consider the example below, where we've built a registration Zing asking a series of questions: first name and last name:

In the event that a contact doesn't complete the registration, we can set a notification of the timeout by selecting Timeout Actions, Add Timeout Action and Send message to contact:

This prevents contacts from responding to Zing afters the automation has stopped like the example below where the Zing timed out, the contact responded, the information was not saved to the contact profile and the conversation was opened. ​