Shared Inbox for Customer Conversations in Planfix
A shared inbox for customer conversations means every message a customer sends you lands in one system instead of six apps on six different phones. Customer communication across channels in Planfix turns each conversation into a task that your team can answer, discuss, hand over and look up later. This 3:54 video for beginners follows one request from the first message to the full customer history.
What you’ll learn: customer messages in one inbox
- Which channels you can bring into Planfix, from messengers to telephony and website chats.
- What happens at the first message: a contact card and a task appear automatically.
- How an employee answers the customer straight from task comments.
- How to discuss a question with a colleague without the customer seeing it.
- How a conversation moves to another person when someone is away.
- Why the record of every interaction stays with the company.
How to run customer conversations in Planfix, step by step
Step 1. Connect the channels your customers use
Each channel is added as an integration; the video lists social networks, messengers, IP telephony, email and website chats as sources of requests. Two-way conversations inside tasks work with Chatra, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Viber and WhatsApp, as the help article on communicating with clients from Planfix explains: the customer writes to your company account, the message arrives as a task, and your comments go back through the same channel. Start by connecting your social media and messengers.
Step 2. Watch incoming messages in the Chronicle
Whichever channel a customer picks, the message shows up in the Chronicle with their name and the icon of the channel they used. The Chronicle is a feed you keep clear: you see the event, respond and mark it as read, and it leaves the feed. Hovering over an event opens quick actions — Read, Remind, Timeframe, Complete — so nothing that needs no answer piles up.
Step 3. Let the contact card and the task appear by themselves
At the first interaction Planfix creates a contact card with the customer’s name and their username or ID in the channel they wrote from, plus a task holding the text of the message. The employees responsible are attached to that task right away and are notified. The channel is linked to the task rather than to the contact, so a customer who writes from two channels produces two tasks; merge the contacts in your single contact database and every one of those tasks appears in the merged card.
Step 4. Reply to the customer in task comments
The employee reads the message in the task and answers by adding a comment. The customer receives that reply in their own messenger and carries on writing there. For questions that come back every week, the quick replies mechanism saves retyping the same answer.
Step 5. Discuss internally and hand the conversation over
A question you cannot answer alone stays in the same task: add a comment for a colleague or pass the work to them. The customer receives only the comments addressed to them. To keep a note strictly internal, select the employees who should see it and move the privacy slider next to the employee list; account administrators can still see every comment. Because the conversation lives in the task and not on someone’s phone, a colleague covering sick leave or a vacation reads the history and continues from there, on behalf of the company.
Example: a business proposal prepared by a colleague
In the video a customer asks for a business proposal. The employee does not leave the conversation: inside the same task they add a comment, notify the colleague who prepares proposals and keep that comment hidden from the customer. The colleague sees the request with the whole conversation, so nothing has to be retold, and the answer goes back to the customer in the chat they started.
Who it’s for: sales, support and management
- Sales teams: requests from every channel arrive as tasks, so no answer waits for somebody to check Facebook.
- Customer support: a small team handles more inquiries because they all arrive in one place and follow the same procedure.
- Team leads: you set the rules by which incoming requests are distributed among employees.
- Finance and management: reports show who did what and where the breakdowns were, which feeds payroll and management decisions.
- Business owners: conversations run through company accounts, so employees who leave cannot take the client base or forward requests to themselves.
FAQ
Can one customer write to us from several channels?
Yes. Planfix creates a contact card for each channel username or ID, and the channel is linked to the task. Merge the cards that belong to the same person, and all their tasks stay available in the merged card.
Can I split one messenger conversation into separate tasks?
No. A messenger or chat shows the customer a single thread that they cannot split, so all communication with that contact runs inside one Planfix task. Email is different: it supports several threads with the same person.
Will the customer see our internal discussion in the task?
No. The customer gets only the comments addressed to them. For a private note, pick the employees who should see it and move the privacy slider next to the employee list; account administrators still see all comments.
Start with the channel your customers use most
Connect one channel, let the first requests become tasks and answer them from Planfix for a week. Every interaction stays in the customer’s profile whatever the channel, so sales, support and any other department work from the same history. For a closer look at channels and lead handling, see omnichannel customer communication in Planfix. New to Planfix? Start your free trial.
