A thorough question can keep Crunch working for several minutes — reading your data, checking what it found, and writing it up. You shouldn’t have to keep a browser tab open and wait for it. With background turns, you send the analysis to the background, close the tab or move on to something else, and Crunch tells you when it’s ready. Say you ask on Friday afternoon for a week-by-week look at signups by channel: you can head off, and the answer is waiting, with an email saying so.
What you’ll need
- A Team plan (see pricing). Everyone on the plan gets background turns, including teammates the plan covers.
Without it, nothing changes: closing the tab stops the analysis, as it always has.
Send an analysis to the background
- Ask your question as usual. While Crunch is working, a Run in background button appears next to the Stop generating button in the message box.
- Click Run in background. It changes to In background, and a note says you can close the tab and that you’ll be notified when it’s ready.
- Close the tab, or carry on elsewhere. Crunch keeps working.
You don’t have to click the button first. If you close the tab while Crunch is working, your browser asks whether you want to leave the site; choose to leave and the analysis carries on in the background. And if you click New chat or open another conversation in the middle of an analysis, Crunch asks what to do with it: Run in background, Stop it, or Stay here.
Find out it’s ready
When the analysis ends, you get a notification in the bell and an email, each with a link straight back to the conversation. It tells you one of three things:
- Your analysis is ready — the answer is waiting.
- Your analysis needs your answer — Crunch paused to ask you something, for example whether to keep going after working for a while. Reply in the conversation and it carries on from there.
- Your analysis stopped before it finished — something on our side cut it short. Open the conversation to see what was done, and click Retry to run it again.
Come back while it’s still working
Open the conversation any time. You’ll see what Crunch has done so far, with the line Working in the background — this updates as it goes under it, and the answer fills in as Crunch works. In your conversation list, a small green dot marks a conversation that is still working.
Stop it
Closing the tab never stops a background analysis; stopping it is always your choice. While you’re watching it, click Stop generating in the message box. If you’ve come back to the conversation later, click Stop on the Working in the background line. The reply keeps what was done and says Stopped by you. You aren’t sent a notification for an analysis you stopped yourself.
How to tell it worked
After you click Run in background, the button reads In background. Close the tab, and later the bell shows Your analysis is ready (or needs your answer) with a link to the conversation, and the same arrives by email.
Good to know
- It counts as a running analysis. Your plan allows a set number of analyses at once, and one in the background is one of them. If you start another while it works, you may see “You have too many requests running at once. Wait for one to finish and try again.” Stop the background one, or wait for it, and ask again.
- A pause for your answer is a pause. When Crunch stops to ask whether to keep going, it waits for you rather than carrying on alone.
- The title may be generic. If the analysis ends before the conversation has a title, the notification calls it “your question”.
- Follow-ups work as usual. Ask a follow-up in the same conversation and Crunch builds on the answer it gave in the background.
Related
- Notifications — where your updates appear and how to read them.
- Ask Crunch about your data — how an analysis works, step by step.
- Long conversations — what happens as a conversation grows.