Shared inbox

The shared inbox is where every customer conversation lands — whether it came through the chat widget on your site or arrived as an email. You and your team can read the full thread, see what the AI said and which sources it cited, step in to reply as a person, and move the conversation to close. Everything is in one place, ordered by recency, with nothing hidden in a separate inbox per channel.

What shows up here

Every session a visitor starts through your chat widget creates a thread in the inbox. Email messages sent to your agent's inbound address arrive the same way — as a conversation thread with the subject line as its title, quoted history stripped, so the AI and your team see the actual question rather than a wall of forwarded text. Both channel types live in the same list, sorted together by activity, so there's no switching between a chat view and an email view.

Inside each thread you can see the visitor's messages, every AI reply with its numbered citations, and any internal notes your teammates left. The AI's citations are preserved exactly as the visitor saw them, so you can tell at a glance what source the AI drew from and whether it was right.

Team access

Everyone you add to your workspace can read and reply in the shared inbox. To invite someone, go to Settings → Team and enter their email address. Once they accept, they have full access: they can open any conversation, take it over from the AI, send replies, leave internal notes, and change the status. There's no per-conversation assignment yet — the inbox is shared, which keeps things simple when you're a small team. If you need to hand something off informally, a note addressed to the right person is the most common approach.

Taking over from the AI

Open a conversation and type a reply in the composer. The moment you send it, the AI stops answering that thread. The visitor sees a short notice that a person has joined, and no AI reply will come in on top of yours. You stay in control of the conversation until you decide to hand it back.

To give the conversation back to the AI — useful when a visitor follows up later with a routine question — choose Let the AI reply from the conversation menu. The AI picks up from where the thread left off, with the full history in context.

If you want to draft a reply without committing to a send, the Assist tab writes a draft from your own help content. A grounded draft shows citations; one that couldn't find supporting content says so, so you know where to add your own judgment before sending.

Internal notes

Switch the composer to Note before sending. Notes are visible to everyone on your team in the thread but never sent to the visitor. Use them to flag what you're waiting on, record context you found outside the system, or explain a decision before closing a conversation. Notes are saved alongside the conversation history, so they're there when someone else picks the thread up later.

Status, snooze, and close

Every conversation is open by default. Snooze hides it from the main list until a time you choose — later today, tomorrow, next week, or a custom date. It reappears automatically when it wakes, back in the open list as if it just arrived. This is the right move for conversations where you're waiting on something: a refund to process, a colleague to reply, an issue to get fixed.

Closing marks it done. Once closed, a conversation stays closed — the AI won't pick it back up if the same visitor opens a new session, but that new session starts a fresh thread and the AI answers from scratch. Closing also does something useful in the background: Chattering drafts a help article from the conversation and parks it in Help center → AI drafts, unpublished, for you to review. A question you answered manually once can become documentation for the next visitor in one click.

Priority is optional and mostly useful when the inbox is busy. Marking something high priority doesn't change how it's processed, but it does make it easy to filter the list to the conversations that need attention first.

Filtering and search

The filter bar at the top of the list switches between Open, Snoozed, Closed, and All. The search box matches the full text of the conversation — the visitor's messages, the AI replies, and the notes — so you can find a thread by something the visitor said, not just by their name. Searching across closed conversations is particularly useful for finding a similar question you answered before, so you can reuse the reply or publish the draft article it generated.

Frequently asked questions

Can I assign a conversation to a specific teammate?

Not yet — everyone shares the same view of the inbox without explicit assignment. The note feature is the best workaround: leave a note mentioning the right person by name before snoozing or stepping away from the thread.

Will the AI reply if the visitor writes back after I close a conversation?

No. A closed conversation stays closed. If the same visitor starts a new chat session, that opens a new thread and the AI answers from scratch — it won't reopen the old one. If they reply to the original email thread, that reply creates a new conversation, not a reopened one.

Can I reply to an email conversation from the inbox?

Yes. Sending a reply from the inbox composer sends it as an email to the visitor, properly threaded so it appears as a reply in their mail client — not as a new message. Widget conversations reply through the widget. The two channels don't cross: a visitor who started on chat won't receive an email from you unless they wrote in by email.

A conversation isn't showing up in the inbox — what should I check?

If the conversation is still active and the AI is mid-reply, it will appear once a message is sent. Email conversations arrive after Chattering processes the inbound message, which normally takes under a minute; if it's been longer, check whether the forwarding rule on your email address is active. Conversations from visitors who sent a message but then closed the widget before the AI replied still create a thread — they're in the inbox, just without a response from the visitor yet.