Communications is where everything from outside your organisation arrives. Email, WhatsApp, calls, SMS, voicemail, web chat, bookings and signature requests, in one place.
The apps people work in daily have their own sections: Sync Chat for internal conversation, WhatsApp for that channel in depth, and the calendar and Meeting Intelligence inside Workspace. This section is the layer underneath them.
Everything becomes a thread
Eight sources, one shape.
| Source | What it is |
|---|---|
| A message to one of your addresses | |
| A conversation on your business number | |
| Call | A phone call, inbound or outbound |
| SMS | A text message |
| Voicemail | A message somebody left |
| Web chat | A visitor on your website |
| Booking | Somebody booking time |
| Signature | A document signing request |
The last two surprise people. A booking and a signature request are conversations with somebody outside your organisation, so they arrive in the same list as an email rather than in two separate places you have to remember to check.
That is the whole argument for a unified inbox. The alternative is what most organisations actually run: a shared mailbox, a phone nobody logs, a WhatsApp on one person's handset, and a booking tool emailing notifications into the shared mailbox. Four systems, no shared history, and a customer who repeats themselves every time they change channel.
Channels are routers, not owners
This is the idea the whole section rests on.
A channel is how something arrived. It is not what the thing is, and it does not decide what happens next.
An inbound message never creates a deal. A stranger emailing your sales address becomes a lead, not an opportunity worth money in your pipeline. Something arriving at support becomes a ticket.
That restraint matters more than it sounds. A system that turns every inbound message into a deal produces a pipeline full of noise within a month, forecasts nobody believes, and a sales team that quietly stops using it. Here, promoting something into a deal is a decision a person makes, which is what keeps the pipeline meaning something.
Scoped to your department and your hub
The inbox is not one shared pile. Two things narrow it.
Your department, derived from where you actually work rather than from a list somebody maintains separately. Support sees support conversations. Sales sees sales. Somebody who belongs to two departments sees both.
Your acting hub, the same context that scopes every other list in the platform. Switching hub switches the inbox along with everything else.
That scoping is what makes a shared inbox usable past about five people. An undifferentiated queue is one where everybody assumes somebody else is handling it, and it is also one nobody can be held to.
The practical consequence: a colleague's inbox is legitimately different from yours. A thread you cannot find is often in another department rather than missing.
What a thread carries
Whatever channel it came from, a thread holds the same things, and those are what you work with.
Who it is with, as a record rather than an address or a number.
An owner, or nobody, which is the state that needs fixing.
A state: open, snoozed until a time, muted, or closed.
A priority, set by a person rather than inferred from the wording.
Its source, which is how it arrived and nothing more.
That last one is worth repeating. The source is a fact about transport. It does not imply urgency, it does not imply what kind of work this is, and it does not decide who should answer. A furious complaint and a routine question arrive identically as far as the channel is concerned.
What is here
The department inbox, the daily surface and the buckets it is organised into.
Reading and replying, which changes shape depending on the channel.
Email, including how sending actually works, and signatures.
Calls, the telephony surface: activity, wrap-up, recordings and transcripts.
Call routing and lists, for anybody running outbound calling or wondering why an agent is not receiving inbound.
Web chat, the visitor-facing channel.
What is somewhere else
Sync Chat. Internal conversation between colleagues, with its own section.
WhatsApp in depth. The inbox shows WhatsApp threads; that channel's own rules, templates, the 24-hour window and staff commands are in the WhatsApp section.
The calendar and Meeting Intelligence, both in Workspace.
Channel setup. Connecting a number, connecting your email account, configuring routing and the chat widget are administrative, and live in Operations.
The property that makes this work
Every thread is attached to whoever it is with, and that person is a record.
So a conversation is not an isolated exchange. It sits alongside the deal, the invoices, the previous calls and the meeting summaries, and whoever picks it up has the context without asking anybody.
That is the difference between a shared mailbox and a communications layer. A shared mailbox tells you what was said. This tells you who said it, what else is true about them, and what everybody else in the building already knows.
What it will not do
It will not decide who answers. Beyond narrowing to a department, getting a thread to the right person is a human act.
It will not merge people for you. Somebody emailing from one address and messaging from another number is two records until somebody says otherwise.
It will not chase anybody. An unanswered thread stays unanswered, visibly, until a person picks it up. That visibility is the mechanism, and it only works if somebody looks.
Where to start
If you work a queue daily, read The Department Inbox and then Reading and Replying. Between them, that is the job.
If you make or take calls, read Calls.
If you manage a team that does, read Call Routing and Lists, which covers why a particular agent is or is not receiving inbound and what to do about it.
Did this answer your question?
No, ask a person