• Introduction
• Requirements
• Which conversations a team member sees
• Conversations nobody owns
• Who is notified of new messages
• Handing a conversation to someone else
• Points to keep in mind

Introduction

When every team member sees every conversation, two of them answer the same client while another client waits, and a sales agent can read conversations that belong to support. When each team member sees only the clients they are responsible for, the inbox becomes a work queue: what is in your list is yours to answer.

Alaaqat decides who sees a conversation from the client's contact: its Owner and its Communication Team, together with the permissions of the team member. This document explains that rule, what it means for clients nobody owns yet, and how to move a conversation to someone else.

Requirements

Permissions are given per team. Teams and their permissions are set up by an account administrator.

Which conversations a team member sees

Every team member with View Conversations sees all the channel tabs. What changes is the list of clients under each tab:

Owner and Communication Team are two properties of the contact, in the Contact Users group. For how they also decide access to the contact page, see Owner and communication team.

The same rule applies everywhere in the inbox:

• The search and the filters only return conversations the team member can see.
• The unread count on a channel tab counts only the unread messages of those conversations.
• Mark All Messages as Read marks only those conversations as read. Conversations of other team members stay unread for them.

Conversations nobody owns

A client who writes to you for the first time gets a new contact with no Owner and no Communication Team. Until one of them is set, only team members with View All Contacts see that conversation.

If none of the people who answer clients has View All Contacts, new clients wait in an inbox nobody is looking at. There are two ways to avoid it:

• Assign new clients automatically. An Auto Assignment workflow sets the owner as soon as a client writes in, so the conversation appears in that team member's list straight away. See the Auto Assignment document.
• Give one person the job of dispatching. A supervisor with View All Contacts uses the Unowned filter in the inbox to find clients nobody is responsible for, and sets their owner or team.

Who is notified of new messages

When a client writes in, Alaaqat notifies the team members who have View Conversations and who can open that client's contact:

• with View Contact Details, for any client;
• with View Team Contacts, for clients whose Communication Team is one of their teams;
• with View User's Contacts, for clients they own.

How each team member receives the notification (in the app, as a pop-up, in the browser) follows their own notification preferences.

{info} Give the same contact permissions to everyone who answers clients. A team member who sees a conversation in the inbox but has none of the three permissions above is not notified when that client writes again, and does not see the client's details in the contact panel.

Handing a conversation to someone else

To move a client to another team member or team, change the contact's Owner or Communication Team:

1. Open the conversation in Conversations > Inbox.
2. In the contact panel, choose Contact Details and open the Contact Users group.
3. Click the pencil next to Owner or Communication Team, choose the new value, and click Save.

From then on, the conversation appears in the new owner's or team's list. A team member without View All Contacts who no longer owns the client, and is not in the new team, stops seeing it.

Points to keep in mind

• The read state is shared. When one team member reads a conversation, it is read for everyone who sees it. See Read and unread.
• Changing the owner takes effect immediately. Tell the new owner when you hand over a client mid-conversation, so the client doesn't wait while the conversation sits unread in someone else's list.