Inbox
One thread per customer, whatever channel they used.
WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, email and web chat arrive in the same conversation, with the order and the customer's history already attached. A routing rule assigns it, a teammate can leave a private note, and a handoff carries the whole thread to the next person.
Illustrative demo with fictional data.
The workspace
Five areas do the work.
The queue you pull from, a thread that behaves like the customer's channel, the private lane your team talks in, the composer, and the customer panel. The tour plays itself; take it over whenever you like.
An illustration of the BlendDesk Inbox. The list below describes each area of it in text.
Contact attributes, custom fields, previous conversations from any channel and the conversation's own metadata sit beside the thread, so nobody asks a customer something the panel already knows.
In the product
- Contact details, company and custom fields
- Previous conversations from any channel
- Assignment, priority, tags and participants in the same panel
Step 5 of 5
Know who you are talking to before you type.
Contact attributes, custom fields, previous conversations from any channel and the conversation's own metadata sit beside the thread, so nobody asks a customer something the panel already knows.
In the product
- Contact details, company and custom fields
- Previous conversations from any channel
- Assignment, priority, tags and participants in the same panel
The 24-hour customer service window is Meta's rule, set out in Meta's WhatsApp developer documentation.
Illustrative demo with fictional data.
Ownership
Who owns it, and when it is late.
A conversation has one assigned agent and, optionally, a team. Rules do the first pass — by inbox, tag, language or business hours — and an SLA policy puts a clock on first response, next response and resolution so a late thread surfaces before the customer chases it.
- Mine, Unassigned, All
- Three queues with live counts. Unassigned is the one that matters: nothing sits in it quietly, because a rule or a person picks it up.
- Assignment by rule
- Route on the inbox, the tag, the customer's language, the time of day or a custom field, to a person or to a team. Manual assignment overrides it.
- Availability
- Agents set themselves Online, Busy or Offline, so routing hands work to people who are actually there.
- SLA policies
- First response, next response and resolution targets. The conversation carries an SLA chip, and reports show hit rate and misses by team.
Illustrative demo with fictional data.
Collaboration
A handoff carries the whole thread.
When Scout or a rule hands a conversation to a person, the next pair of eyes gets everything: the messages, the private notes, the order context and the trace of what Scout already did. Nobody asks the customer to start again, and nothing gets pasted into a second tool.
- Private notes and @mentions
- Write to your team inside the conversation. Mention a person or a team and it lands in their Mentions view.
- Participants
- Join a conversation you are not assigned to and follow it. Participating is its own sidebar view, so nothing you are watching gets lost.
- Handoff with the trace attached
- A Scout handoff posts what it read and why it stopped, so the agent taking over starts from the agent's reasoning instead of a blank thread.
Illustrative demo with fictional data.
Finding things
Filters, folders and bulk actions for when volume picks up.
Build the view once and come back to it. Conditions combine with AND and OR, a saved filter becomes a folder in the sidebar, and anything you can filter you can act on in bulk.
- Filter on anything the conversation knows
- Status, assignee, priority, inbox, team, contact, tags, browser language, referrer, dates and your own custom fields.
- Folders
- Save a set of conditions as a folder and open it from the sidebar — yours, or shared with the team.
- Mentions, Participating, Waiting for reply
- Three standing views for what needs you, what you follow and what is waiting on you.
- Bulk actions
- Select a filtered set and assign, tag, snooze or resolve all of it at once.
Illustrative demo with fictional data.
Speed
The repeated work is typing. Cut it to a few keystrokes.
Agents answer the same handful of questions all day. Saved replies, quick actions and tags turn each of them into a shortcode, a click and a label that reporting can count.
Saved replies
Type / and a shortcode to drop in a prepared reply, then edit it before you send. Shared across the team, so the answer is the same from everyone.
Quick actions
Save a sequence — assign, tag, send a transcript, resolve — and run the whole thing from one button.
Tags
Label as you go. Tags drive filters, trigger automations and split every report, so the labelling pays for itself.
Illustrative demo with fictional data.
Keep exploring
The inbox is where the rest of BlendDesk shows up.
Questions
Inbox questions, answered.
Can several people work on the same conversation?
One agent is assigned and, optionally, a team. Anyone else can join as a participant, leave private notes and be mentioned. The customer sees none of it.
Which channels does the inbox support?
WhatsApp through the Cloud API with your own Meta business account, website live chat, email over Gmail, Microsoft or IMAP, Telegram, SMS through Twilio, and a generic API channel. Instagram and Messenger are set up with our team and depend on Meta's approval.
What happens when WhatsApp's 24-hour window closes?
The composer tells you before you type and switches to your approved templates. The window and the template requirement are Meta's, documented in their developer documentation; BlendDesk's job is to make the state obvious instead of letting a message fail.
What does an agent get when Scout hands a conversation over?
The full thread, the private notes, the customer and order context, and Scout's run trace — the passages it read, the tools it called and the reason it stopped. The agent replies in the same box Scout was drafting in.
Bring your customer conversations together.
Tell us a little about your team. We'll show you how BlendDesk could fit the way you already talk to customers.