Conversations overview

Conversations is how you communicate through the platform, whether that is talking to a customer or talking internally with your team.

Everything lives in one place. A customer's email replies, their texts, their messages on any connected social platform, and your own internal chat with colleagues all sit in the same area rather than being split across separate tools.

Customer and internal communication

Conversations covers two different kinds of talking, and it is worth being clear on the difference.

Customer conversations are the messages coming in from and going out to the people you are booking. These are the emails, texts and social messages connected through your Connected accounts, all landing here rather than in separate inboxes.

Internal conversations are for talking with your own team, either with specific people or with everyone in a team channel. This is your day to day internal chat, kept in the same place as customer messages rather than in a separate app.

Channels in the sidebar

Every conversation sits inside a channel, and the sidebar splits them into three kinds.

Custom channels

Custom channels are ones created for your business. You set these up yourself for whatever grouping makes sense to you, whether that is a channel per department, per topic, or anything else you want a dedicated space for.

Team channels

Team channels are created automatically whenever you create a new team.

You do not have to set these up separately. Build the team, and the channel for it already exists, ready for whoever is in that team to talk in.

Entity channels

Entity channels are created when conversations are enabled on a specific entity, such as a lead or a booking.

Any entity can have conversations enabled on it. Once enabled, that entity gets its own channel, and everything relating to that entity, a customer's email replies, their texts, their proposal activity, sits in one thread tied to the record it belongs to.

This is what keeps a customer's history together. Open the entity and you see the whole conversation with that customer in context, rather than having to go looking for their emails in one place and their texts in another.

Why it is all in one place

The alternative is checking four inboxes and hoping nothing sits unread in the one you check least often.

Bringing every channel a customer might use into one conversation, tied to the record it relates to, means anyone on your team can pick up where things stand without having to ask around first. It also means the conversation stays with the booking rather than living in somebody's personal inbox and leaving with them.

For internal chat, having it in the same system as customer conversations means you are never switching between a separate tool to talk about a booking and the record for that booking itself. The conversation and the thing it is about sit next to each other.

Conversation settings

Open Settings, then Conversations, to configure how conversations behave across your account.

Default signature

Set the signature used on all outbound email.

Choose one of the provided templates as it is, or choose a template and then select custom HTML signature to override parts of it, or paste in your own HTML signature code entirely and skip the templates altogether.

The template you choose here will use variables to insert the data of the current user and brand into the signature, so you can maintain one signature style across all users.

Whichever route you take, this is the signature that goes out on every email sent through the system, so it is worth getting right once rather than fixing it after it has gone out on a hundred emails.

Allow personal messages

This toggle controls whether your team can message each other one to one.

Turned on, your team users can send personal messages between themselves, in addition to talking in team and custom channels.

Turned off, there is no one to one messaging. Team members only have the generic team chat, with no way to message an individual colleague directly.

Add conversations to entities

This is the setting that creates entity channels, and it is the one worth understanding properly.

Enabling it on an entity type gives every record of that type its own channel. Enable it on jobs, for example, and every job that comes in gets a channel of its own, giving you somewhere to discuss that lead or booking with the customer.

You are not limited to jobs. Tasks, contacts, venues and projects can all have conversations enabled on them too, and each behaves the same way once switched on, with every record of that type getting its own channel.

Turn this on for the entity types where you actually need a running conversation attached to the record. Not every entity needs one, and enabling it everywhere just adds channels nobody uses.

Accessing a channel

Once conversations are enabled for an entity type, you can reach a specific record's channel two ways.

Through the conversations page, which is the chat icon at the bottom left of the sidebar, where every channel you have access to is listed.

Or through the record itself. Open the entity you are editing and a new tab appears on it once conversations have been enabled, taking you straight to that record's channel without going through the sidebar first.

The second route is usually the faster one day to day, since you are often already looking at the booking or the job when you need to say something about it.

What a conversation is

A conversation is a thread of messages between users, or between a user and a customer.

Internal channels, meaning your team and custom channels, only carry internal messaging. There is no customer side to those, so anything said there is only ever seen by your team.

Entity channels are where internal and customer facing conversation both happen, since an entity like a job can have a customer thread and your team's own discussion about it living in the same space.

Message formatting

Messages support more than plain text. You can send formatted text, lists and checklists, attachments, and audio or video.

Checklists are worth knowing about specifically. A task list inside a conversation about a booking means the follow up items live next to the discussion that produced them, rather than in a separate list somewhere else that somebody has to remember to check.

Sending messages in external conversations

An external channel, meaning a channel with a customer on the other end of it, gives you more options when you go to send a message than an internal channel does.

Canned responses

A canned response is a message template you have created in advance, ready to load into a conversation rather than typing the same thing out again.

Canned responses use variables, which fill themselves in with that customer's details when you insert the response. Write a welcome message once as "Hi {first name}, we look forward to working with you", save it as a canned response, and every time you load it into a conversation the customer's actual first name goes in rather than the placeholder.

This is worth building out beyond just a welcome message. Anything you find yourself typing more than a couple of times, whether that is a standard answer to a common question or your usual message when a deposit is overdue, is a candidate for a canned response.

Drafts

You can save a message as a draft rather than sending it straight away, and come back to finish it later.

Drafts are not only something you create yourself. Automations can create them too, so a draft waiting for you might be something you started, or something an automation prepared and is waiting on you to review before it goes out.

Access your drafts from the Quick Actions menu, where you can quick send anything sitting there, whether you wrote it or an automation did.

Choosing how to send

When you are messaging a customer through an external channel, you choose how the message actually reaches them. There are three ways.

• Portal message. Send it as a message the customer can see when they log into their client portal. This keeps the conversation inside the system entirely, with nothing going out over email or text.

• Email. Send it as an email. You choose which of your connected email addresses it sends from, then write a subject line and the body of the message. Use this when you want the message to land in the customer's regular inbox rather than needing them to log into a portal to see it.

• SMS. Send it as a text message or as WhatsApp. Text messages are sent as plain text, and any HTML formatting you have used elsewhere, such as in a canned response, is dropped. Check how a message reads once it is stripped down before you send it this way, since a message built around bold text or a bullet list may not say what you intended once the formatting is gone.

Putting these together

Canned responses save you from retyping, drafts let you or an automation get most of the way there and leave the final decision to a person, and the sending method controls where it actually lands.

A common pattern is an automation drafting a message at the right moment, a canned response supplying the wording, and you reviewing it from Quick Actions and choosing the right channel before it goes. Nothing has to be typed from scratch, and nothing goes out to a customer without a person having looked at it first.