Routing and Business Hours Deciding who picks up, and what happens when nobody is there.

An inbox with no routing is an inbox where everyone assumes somebody else replied.

Routing

Rules decide who an incoming conversation belongs to, so a new message arrives with an owner rather than waiting to be claimed.

Route by whatever your team is organised around, and keep it simple. Complicated routing fails quietly: when a rule stops matching, the conversation does not error, it just sits unowned.

Business hours

Set when your team is actually available and what happens outside those times.

An automatic reply that sets expectations is worth more than it looks. "We are closed until 9am and will reply then" prevents the follow-up messages that a silence produces, and it is those follow-ups that make a Monday morning inbox unmanageable.

Business profile

Your name, description, address and hours as customers see them. Worth completing properly: it is the first thing someone checks when they are deciding whether a number is genuinely you.

Chat intents

Where a conversation should become something other than a reply, intents route it: a support case into the ticket queue, an unknown number into leads.

The principle is that an inbound message never silently becomes a deal. It becomes a conversation, and something explicit decides what happens next.