A unified inbox puts every client conversation in one list, whatever channel it arrived on: SMS, email, web chat, WhatsApp, social messages and call logs. The point is not tidiness. It is that nobody on your team can miss a message because it came in somewhere they were not looking. This article answers one question: how do you set up and run Conversations on the levelpartner.ai platform so a team of five or fifty works from one inbox with clear ownership and no unanswered threads?
What changes when the inbox is one list
Before a unified inbox, most firms run five or six separate ones. Sales reads a shared email address. Someone has the company phone for texts. Marketing watches social messages. The website chat goes to whoever installed it. Each channel has its own habits, and a prospect who texts and then emails gets two different people who do not know about each other.
In Conversations, each contact has one thread that holds every message on every channel. Reply by SMS to a message that came by email, and the history stays together. Assign the conversation to a person, and everyone can see who owns it. Filter by unread or by assignee, and a manager sees in seconds what is waiting.
The three rules that make it work
The software is the easy part. The habits decide whether it helps.
- Every conversation has an owner. Unassigned threads belong to nobody, so the default should be that new conversations are assigned automatically to the contact's owner.
- Unread means unanswered. Staff should not open a message and leave it, because it disappears from the unread view. Reply, assign it on, or mark it unread again.
- One place to reply. If a client emails a salesperson's personal address, that reply happens outside the inbox and the thread breaks. Connect each user's mailbox, or make the shared address the one clients use.
Before you start
You need access to Conversations and Settings, and admin rights to connect channels. List every channel clients use to reach you today, including personal mobiles. Have the logins ready for your email provider, your business phone number, and your social pages. Agree who owns new conversations by default and who covers when they are away.
How to set it up
Connect your own mailbox first, because personal email is the channel most often left outside the inbox.
- Go to Settings > My Profile > Email (2-way sync).
- Select Gmail or Outlook, then click Connect.
- Approve the requested permissions.
- Open Conversations and click Create New Message.
- Choose Direct Message, pick a contact and click Continue.
- Check that your address appears in the From field.
Add the other channels from their own screens: a business number under Settings, then Phone System; WhatsApp under Settings, then WhatsApp; and the website chat under Sites, then Chat Widget. Each team member repeats the mailbox steps for their own address. Then show the team how to work the list:
- Open Conversations.
- Use the Filter icon to filter by channel, tags, owner and date.
- Open an unread conversation; it scrolls to the New divider.
- Use the channel selector in the composer to switch channels.
- Select Internal Comment for a private note to colleagues.
- On a call card, click View Transcript to read a recorded call, if transcription is on.
Next, build the assignment rule as a workflow: when a message arrives and the conversation has no assigned user, assign it to the contact's owner, or share it in turn across the team when there is no owner. Agree a reply time for each channel, such as one hour for SMS and chat during working hours, and send a test message on every channel to confirm it lands in the right thread.
What it replaces and what it takes to run
A unified inbox replaces the shared mailbox, the company mobile in a drawer, the social page notifications on someone's phone and the morning question "did anyone reply to that?" It does not replace anyone's job. It makes the same people faster, because they stop switching between tools.
Suppose a firm handles about 600 client messages a month across a shared email address, two mobiles and website chat, and a weekly review finds around 20 a month that nobody answered within a day. Move every channel into Conversations with automatic assignment, and have a manager check the unassigned view twice a day. Most of those 20 would then be caught the same day; the ones left would tend to be holiday gaps, which is what an out-of-hours reply is for.
Plan on a day to connect the channels and a week of the team adjusting. After that, the cost is a manager spending ten minutes, twice a day, on the unassigned and overdue views.
Leaving one channel outside the inbox "because it is only a few messages". That channel becomes the one where messages get lost. Connect every channel clients use, or tell clients plainly that it is not monitored.
When a unified inbox will not help
If one person handles all client contact and already answers everything quickly, the gain is small. If your team does not reply to messages today, putting them in one list will show the problem clearly but will not fix it. You need reply-time targets and a manager who checks them.
Once the inbox is running, the next steps build on it. Answering website chat with an AI agent and a handover cuts the first-reply time. Choosing which channel each message should use covers the rules for switching between them. To get chat into the inbox in the first place, see configuring the live chat widget. And tracing which channels produce revenue shows how the same threads feed your reports.
Troubleshooting
Emails do not appear in Conversations. The mailbox is connected but only for sending. Check the two-way sync connection under your profile settings, and reconnect if the password changed.
The same person appears as two contacts. They wrote from a phone and from an email that were never linked. Merge the contacts so their threads join.
Conversations stay unassigned. The assignment workflow only runs for new contacts. Change its trigger to every inbound message without an assigned user.
Staff say they cannot see some conversations. Their user permissions limit them to assigned conversations. Adjust the permission if they need to see the full inbox.
Frequently asked questions
Which channels can a unified inbox include?
On the platform, Conversations holds email, SMS, calls, web chat, WhatsApp and messages from connected social pages, all on the contact's thread.
Can several people work in the same inbox?
Yes. Each user sees the conversations their permissions allow, and assignment shows who owns each thread.
Do clients see a different number or address?
Not if you connect the number and address they already use. If you add a new number, tell clients and put it on your site and signatures.
Can I report on reply times?
Start with a workflow rather than a report. It can flag or reassign any thread that waits longer than your agreed reply time, so overdue replies reach a manager while they still matter, not in a monthly summary.