Channels are how the outside world reaches you. This path is independent of the others, and part of it involves waiting on other companies, so start it on day one and let it run alongside everything else.
What there is to connect
| Channel | Where |
|---|---|
| Personal email | Connecting your tools |
| Shared addresses | Email addresses and routing |
| Mail forwarding | Forwarding mail from your provider |
| Your own domain | Connecting your own domain |
| Phone | Phone setup |
| Connecting your number | |
| Web chat | Web chat and chat intents |
Start with the slow ones
WhatsApp needs verification by Meta, which takes days rather than minutes and can bounce back for reasons that are not obvious. Start it first. See Connecting your number.
A phone number has to be provisioned, and porting an existing one is measured in weeks. See Phone setup.
Domain changes propagate, usually quickly and occasionally not. See Connecting your own domain.
Everything else is same-day. Doing the slow three first is the difference between a week and a fortnight.
Start with one channel working properly
A single shared address, routed correctly, owned by a named person, beats five channels half configured. Get the round trip working once and the rest follow the same pattern.
Email, and the distinction that matters
Two different things, and people conflate them.
Your own address is personal, connected from your profile, and is what you send from. See Connecting your tools.
A shared address is the organisation's: sales, support, accounts. It arrives in a department inbox where a team works it. See Email addresses and routing.
Set up shared addresses before people start using personal ones for customer work. The habit forms in the first fortnight, and once somebody has answered a customer from their own mailbox for a month, the conversation about doing it properly is harder.
The number people will call
Decide early which number is public, because it goes on your website, your documents and your signatures, and changing it later means chasing all three.
Porting an existing number keeps the continuity and takes weeks. A new number is immediate and means everything printed with the old one is now wrong. Neither is better; both are worth deciding deliberately rather than by default. See Phone setup.
Routing
Once addresses exist, decide where things land and who owns them. See Inbox ownership and auto rules.
Keep the first set of rules small. Three rules that work beat fifteen that interact in ways nobody can trace. You can always add.
One catch-all that reaches a person. The failure worth designing against is a message that matches no rule and lands nowhere.
Test from outside
Every check on this page has to be done from outside your organisation.
Sending yourself an email from your own account frequently works when the same message from a stranger does not, because it never leaves your provider. Use a personal address, a phone that is not on your account, a browser that is not signed in.
Ten minutes of testing from the outside catches the class of problem that otherwise gets discovered by a customer.
Web chat
Quick to enable and easy to get wrong in one specific way.
Do not switch it on until somebody is watching it. An unanswered chat widget is worse than none, because it turns a visitor who might have emailed into one who feels ignored. See Web chat for how it is worked, and Web chat and chat intents to configure it.
Set hours honestly. A widget available at midnight is a promise your website makes on your behalf.
What arrives where
Worth drawing once, on paper, before configuring anything.
For each channel: which address or number, which department, who owns it, what happens if nobody picks it up.
Five lines, and it turns routing from a series of individual settings into a design somebody can check. The failure it prevents is the common one: three rules that each look sensible and together send support mail to sales.
Signatures
Once email works, signatures. They apply to what people send and take two minutes each. See Email for the four layouts.
Get one person's right, then show everybody. The alternative is nine variations of your company's contact details in circulation.
Templates
Reusable message content, which lives with automations rather than with the inbox because that is its main consumer. See Communication templates.
WhatsApp templates are separate and have their own approval process. See Message templates.
Consent
If you will message customers on WhatsApp or in bulk, consent is not optional and it is not a formality. See Consent and opt-out.
Set it up before the first campaign, not after the first complaint.
Order of connection
Slow ones first, then email, then chat. Chat last because it is the only one that should not go live until somebody is rostered to answer it.
Do not connect everything
The instinct is to switch on every channel available. Resist it.
A channel nobody watches is worse than one you do not offer. It makes a promise your organisation does not keep, and the customer who used it feels ignored rather than redirected.
Start with the channels you already answer today. Add the rest when somebody owns them.
Checking it worked
Send yourself something on every channel. Email to each shared address, a WhatsApp message, a test call, a chat from your own website.
Check it landed in the right inbox, owned by the right department, and visible to the right people.
Check a reply goes out correctly, from the right address, with a signature.
That round trip takes twenty minutes and catches nearly everything.
Next
Bringing your data in, so conversations attach to records rather than floating free.
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