Conversations and operators

A shared inbox where everyone sees everything and nobody owns anything is the most reliable way to keep a customer waiting. Four people look at the same row, three assume somebody else has it, and the chat sits there.

This page is about how PappaChat avoids that.

A conversation always has a state

• Open: the assistant is answering.
• Taken: a person has it and is answering. The assistant is silent.
• To handle: the assistant has a question for you and is waiting. The customer got a holding line, not silence.
• Closed: it is finished. If the customer writes again, it starts again.

The state is visible in the list, not buried inside the chat: you should be able to look at the list and know what needs attention without opening anything.

Claiming is a lock, not a label

When you take a conversation, it is yours. If a colleague tries to take it at the same instant, exactly one of you wins and the other is told who has it. This is not a formality: two operators writing to the same customer at the same time is the most embarrassing thing a support team can do, and it is invisible until it happens in front of a customer.

You can also hand a conversation to a colleague. That one does override, because "give it to Giulia" means exactly that.

Are you available? You decide, and it is two decisions

At the top left of the panel you have two switches: chat and calls. They are separate because they are different things. A phone call interrupts you; a message waits. "This afternoon I will read messages but do not put anyone through to me" is the most ordinary shape of a working day, and it is why a single online/offline toggle is not enough.

What these switches do NOT do, which is worth knowing:

• They do not switch off notifications. You still get what concerns you.
• They take away no permissions. You can work on everything exactly as before; the system simply stops assigning you new things.
• They do not depend on having the panel open. Availability is never inferred from an open browser tab, because that tab says nothing about whether you can take a call, and because answering a WhatsApp message from the phone in your pocket is work exactly like answering from the panel.

Next to your colleagues you can also see who is at work right now. That is useful for deciding who to hand a chat to; it is not what decides whether a person can be given work. That is a declaration, and the person makes it.

When the assistant stops and calls you

The assistant does not guess. When a request falls outside the rules, when a decision is the owner's to make, or when somebody has to approve an exception, it opens a question for the operators, tells the customer it is checking, and stops replying in that chat until it has an answer.

You answer in one of two ways:

• Word for word: what you write reaches the customer exactly as written.
• As guidance: what you write becomes the authoritative truth, and the assistant phrases the reply in the customer's language and in the tone you gave it. Useful when you answer in three hurried words to a customer who wrote to you in German.

Either way the conversation returns to the assistant once it is resolved.

Who it reaches

When the assistant opens a question, that question gets a name on it immediately. It does not land in a pile: it is assigned to an available person, in turn, so the work spreads instead of always falling on the same shoulders.

And here is the rule that outranks everything else on this page:

There is no "nobody" case. If nobody is available, if you all have your switches off, if it is Sunday night: the question still reaches somebody, ultimately whoever owns the account, and it is recorded as "nobody was available" rather than disappearing.

The reason is simple: the cost is not symmetric. A missed chat at a hair salon is one booking; a missed request at a medical practice, a locksmith or an estate agency is a serious problem. A system that is allowed to decide nobody gets told will eventually do exactly that, and nobody finds out until it is late.

Whoever owns the account stays the last net even if they took themselves out of the rotation: a safety net you can switch off is not a safety net.

Who gets what, when the team is split by skill

If people on your team handle different things (sales and support, Italian and German, two locations, two kinds of job), requests can follow that split. You define the skills in your own words, because "skill" means service in a salon, language in a call centre, area in an estate agency, urgency in a medical practice: any fixed list would fit one sector and pinch every other.

If a request matches no skill, it goes back to the normal rotation. It does not vanish. A typo in a field must never be able to switch off your escalations.

If someone answers from their own phone

If the owner replies to a customer straight from their own WhatsApp, the panel notices, records that message in the conversation, and pauses the assistant in that chat for the rest of the working day. Nobody should have to remember to tell the system something the system can see.

Common questions

If I set everything to unavailable, do customers go unanswered? No. The assistant keeps answering everything it knows. What changes is who gets assigned the things that need a person.

Can I set a colleague to offline? Not from the panel. Availability is a declaration a person makes about themselves. If somebody should permanently stop receiving work, you change their role or remove them from the team: those are different decisions and should be made as such.

Does whoever takes a conversation keep it forever? No. You can release it or hand it to a colleague at any time.