The inbox

The inbox is where your team spends its day. Everything a customer sends, on any channel, arrives here as a conversation — and every tool Tola gives you is ultimately in service of getting conversations answered and closed.

What a conversation is

A conversation is a thread between one contact and your business on one channel. It holds:

The agent workspace

The screen has three columns, and they do not change no matter which channel the conversation came in on. A WhatsApp thread and an email thread are worked exactly the same way.

Left — the list. Every conversation you have permission to see. Filter it by status, channel, team, assignee, label or a saved folder. Unread counts sit next to each filter so you can see where the pressure is without opening anything.

Middle — the thread. The full history, oldest to newest. The composer at the bottom has two modes, and the difference matters:

• Reply goes to the customer.
• Private note is visible only to your team. Use @ to mention a teammate — they get notified and the conversation shows up in their Mentions view.

Right — the context panel. Who this is, what you know about them, their previous conversations, the labels and attributes on this thread, and — if Tola AI is on — its suggested reply and the articles it drew from.

Status

Status is the backbone of the inbox. Four values, and each one means something specific:

Conversations that have been sitting open with no agent reply show up in the Unattended view. If one view tells you whether today is going well, it is that one.

Priority

Priority is optional and independent of status. It runs low → medium → high → urgent, and is most useful in two places: sorting the list so the worst thing is at the top, and reporting, where you can see whether urgent issues actually get faster responses than routine ones.

Set it by hand, or have a workflow set it — for example, anything from a contact whose plan attribute is enterprise becomes high priority automatically.

Assignment

A conversation can be assigned to an agent, to a team, or to both. Unassigned conversations sit in a shared pool that anyone with the right permission can pick from.

You rarely want to assign by hand at any volume. Tola can do it for you with round-robin or balanced distribution, respecting each agent's capacity and availability. See assignment and capacity.

Replies and private notes

The composer supports rich text, file attachments, voice notes and emoji. A few things worth knowing:

• Canned responses — type / to insert a saved reply. See macros and canned responses.
• Macros — run a saved sequence of actions (reply, label, assign, resolve) in one click.
• Reply to a specific message on channels that support it, so long threads stay readable.
• Signatures — each agent can set their own, applied automatically on email.
• Attachments — dragged in or pasted; what the customer receives depends on what their channel supports.

Labels

Labels are your own vocabulary for what conversations are about. Create them under Settings → Labels, give each a colour, and apply them by hand or through a workflow.

They are worth taking seriously, because labels are what make reports useful. A label report that shows refund climbing month over month is a business signal, not a support metric — but only if the label gets applied consistently. Keep the list short enough that people actually use it.

Views and folders

Beyond the built-in views — All, Mentions, Participating, Unattended — you can save any filter as a folder. Folders appear in the sidebar with their own unread counts, and can be shared with the whole team.

Useful ones to build early:

• Open + high or urgent priority + unassigned — the "someone deal with this now" queue.
• Open + label refund — for whoever owns refunds this week.
• Pending + last activity more than three days ago — customers you are silently losing.

Search

Search covers messages, contacts and conversations. Advanced search lets you narrow by channel, agent, label, status and date range at once, which is how you answer questions like "what did we tell this customer about their order in March".