Service desk: the Inbox as a customer-service tool

The Inbox is where every conversation lands, whether it came in by SMS, WhatsApp, e-mail or web chat. This page covers the tools that turn it into a service desk. For the basics of two-way messaging, see Conversations and Inbox; for the bot that feeds it, see AI chatbot.

Teams and routing

• Create teams and add members.
• Add routing rules that match channel, keyword, language or tag and send the conversation to a team.
• Choose how a team assigns: none, round-robin or least open.
• Use the views mine, unassigned and all to see what is yours and what nobody has picked up.

Working a conversation

• Status: open, pending, snoozed or resolved. A new message from the contact reopens a conversation, and snoozed ones come back on time.
• Internal notes stay inside your team and are never sent.
• Canned replies are inserted with a shortcut, with the contact's name filled in.
• Priority: a person can set it. Plain rules, not AI, raise a normal conversation to high or urgent for words such as urgent, fraud, legal disputes, complaints and refunds, and record why. A priority a person chose is never overwritten.

Response-time targets

Set a first-response target, per channel if you like. By default it is counted in your opening hours, so a message on Saturday night does not start a clock that nobody could meet. A conversation past its target is flagged and alerts the team, once per wait.

The agent role

Invite support staff with the agent role. An agent sees the Inbox and can read, but has no access to billing, campaigns or API keys, so you can add help without exposing the rest of the account.

Help for the person answering

• Suggested reply: what the assistant would say to the latest message, based on your knowledge and the conversation so far. Nothing is sent. You read it, edit it and send it as your own. If your knowledge does not cover the question, it says so.
• Summary: at most five lines for a long thread, ready when you open it.
• Save as knowledge: offer an answer you just gave as a knowledge entry. It is only a suggestion until you accept it.

What needs me now

A badge in the Inbox shows what is waiting for you. You can switch on browser notifications while the Inbox is open. This is the browser's own notification, not a mobile push.

Reports

• Volume by channel
• First-response and resolution time
• The share of conversations the bot resolved without a person
• Hand-off reasons
• Draft approval rate
• Top unanswered questions, a ready-made to-do list for your knowledge base