# Loops

A Loop is a unit of work you're tracking to an outcome — a customer issue, an order problem, an internal task. Where a chat message scrolls away, a Loop stays open until someone closes it, and it remembers how it ended.

## Anatomy of a Loop

- **Number & title** — every Loop gets a workspace-sequential number (`#1244`) and a title.
- **State** — `running`, `blocked`, `review`, `waiting`, `closed`, or `archived`.
- **Owner** — exactly one person is responsible at any time. Participants can be many; the owner is the one on the hook.
- **Outcome** — closing a Loop records *how* it ended: `resolved`, `partial`, `unresolved`, or `abandoned`, with an optional outcome note. Six months later you don't just know it closed — you know whether it worked.
- **Contact link** — a Loop can be linked to a customer contact, tying internal work to the customer it's for.
- **Timeline** — state changes, ownership changes, and discussion collect on the Loop itself.

## Where Loops come from

- **Promote a chat thread** — a channel conversation that turns into real work can be attached to a new Loop, carrying the messages with it. The discussion that started the work stays with the work.
- **From a live chat conversation** — link a Loop to a customer conversation; the operator's context pane shows every Loop linked to that customer.
- **From scratch** — create one directly when work arrives outside chat.

## Finding them

Loops appear in [search](/search) alongside messages, docs, and contacts — searching a customer's name surfaces their conversations *and* the Loops opened for them.

> Your workspace can rename the primitive — Loop, Mission, Case, or a custom label — in workspace settings. The mechanics stay the same.