Quickstart

This guide takes an empty Tola account and gets you to a real customer message, answered by a real agent, in about fifteen minutes. Do it once and you will understand how the whole product hangs together.

Before you start

You will move faster if you have these ready:

• The channel you want to connect first. For most businesses that is WhatsApp, or the email address customers already write to. Pick the one that gets the most traffic — you can add the rest later.
• The email addresses of one or two teammates. Tola is a shared inbox; it is worth seeing it work with more than one person from the start.
• Admin access to whatever you are connecting. Connecting WhatsApp needs a Meta Business account; connecting email needs access to the mailbox or its DNS.

1. Create your account

Sign up, confirm your email address, and name your account after your business. The name appears in email signatures and on your help center, so use the name customers know you by.

Once you are in, you land on the Overview screen. It is empty, which is expected — nothing has arrived yet.

2. Connect your first channel

Go to Channels → Add channel and pick the one you want. Each channel has its own setup page with the exact steps.

When the channel is created, Tola asks which agents should have access to it. Anyone you leave off will not see conversations from that channel at all — this is how you keep, say, a billing inbox away from the wider support team.

3. Invite your team

Go to Settings → Agents → Add agent and invite your teammates. Each one gets a role:

• Administrator — full access, including settings, billing and reports.
• Agent — answers conversations, cannot change account settings.
• Custom role — you decide exactly what they can reach. See agents, teams and roles.

If you have more than a handful of people, group them into teams — Billing, Onboarding, Tier 2 — so conversations can be routed to a group rather than to one named person.

4. Answer your first conversation

Send yourself a message on the channel you connected. It appears in the Inbox within a second or two.

Open it and you will see the three parts of the agent workspace:

Reply, then set the conversation's status. This is the one habit that makes a shared inbox work:

• Open — needs a human.
• Pending — waiting on the customer.
• Snoozed — come back to it later; it reopens itself.
• Resolved — done.

5. Automate one thing

Before you leave, automate a single repetitive action so you can feel the difference. A good first one: automatically assign every new WhatsApp conversation to a team.

Go to Workflows → Add workflow and build:

Save it, then send yourself another test message. It should route itself.

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You now have a working Tola account. These are the highest-value things to do next, roughly in order:

1. Connect your remaining channels so nothing is answered outside Tola. Channels
2. Write your top ten canned responses. They cover most of what your team types every day. Macros & canned responses
3. Turn on Tola AI and point it at your website or help center so it can answer the easy questions itself. Tola AI
4. Publish a help center. Every article you write is a conversation you never have. Help center
5. Set an SLA so nothing sits unanswered. SLA policies
6. Check reports after a week to see where the time actually goes. Reports