Documentation

The inbox

The inbox is where your team works. Email and live chat both land here, so a customer who emails on Monday and opens the chat widget on Thursday is one history rather than two disconnected tickets.

The three panes

The screen is split into three columns, each resizable by dragging its edge:

1. Views — on the left, the list of filters that decide which conversations you are looking at.
2. Conversation list — the matching conversations, newest activity first, with the customer, ticket number, subject and tags.
3. The conversation — the message thread, with the customer and order context in a sidebar on the right.

Above the list you can filter by All, Chat or Email, and switch brand with the brand picker. If you support several storefronts, that picker is how you move between them — everything below it is scoped to the brands you have selected.

Views

Built in

Four views cover the shared queue:

• All Open — everything still open, across the team.
• Unassigned — open conversations nobody owns yet. This is the queue to work down.
• Assigned — open conversations that already have an owner.
• Snoozed — conversations hidden until their wake time.

Under Personal you get the same idea narrowed to you: Assigned to Me and My Snoozed.

An AI group gives you visibility over what the AI agent has been doing:

• AI Drafts — replies waiting for a human to approve, edit or reject. If you run in draft mode, this is your main queue.
• Closed by AI — conversations the AI resolved and closed without a human.
• Flagged by AI — conversations the AI marked as needing a person to look.

At the bottom sit Closed, Failed Emails (messages that could not be delivered — worth checking periodically) and Trash.

Your own views

Beyond the built-ins you can save any filter as a view. When you create one you choose its visibility: Shared with team, which puts it under Shared Views for everyone in the organisation, or private, which puts it under My Views where only you see it.

Views can be grouped into folders, and folders follow the same shared or private split — a shared view can only live in a shared folder. Rename, move and delete are on the right-click menu. Sections and folders remember whether you collapsed them.

Filters combine conditions such as status, channel, assignee, tag, brand and SLA state, so a view like “unassigned chat conversations tagged returns, older than two hours” is a few clicks.

Working a conversation

The customer sidebar

Opening a conversation shows the customer panel on the right. Depending on what is connected, it holds:

• Contact — email address and how long they have been a customer.
• Brand — which storefront the conversation belongs to.
• Shopify — lifetime value, order count and the most recent order with its fulfilment status, linked through to the Shopify admin. This is the context that stops you switching tabs mid-reply. See Connecting Shopify.
• Conversation tags — add and remove them inline.
• Conversation history — this customer's other conversations.
• AI Activity — the step-by-step record of what the AI did, covered in The AI agent.

Replying and internal notes

The composer has two tabs. Reply goes to the customer. Internal Note stays inside your team and is never sent — use it to leave context for whoever picks the conversation up next. You can mention colleagues in a note to draw their attention to it.

Send buttons come in two forms: Send, and Send & Close which sends and closes in one step. When you are approving an AI draft the equivalent pair is Approve and Approve & Close — approving with close sends the reply and closes the conversation together, which is the normal ending for a question that is now fully answered. Your last choice is remembered, so a team that always closes on reply is not re-picking it every time.

Drag the handle above the composer to give yourself more writing room; the height persists between conversations.

Macros

Macros are saved replies. Open the macro picker in the composer, search, and insert — the text drops into your draft where you can edit before sending. Use them for the answers you type constantly and that do not justify handing to the AI.

Assignment

Assign a conversation to a teammate, or to a department, from the conversation header. Assigning to a person makes it theirs and moves it into their Assigned to Me. Departments are useful when the right owner is a function — fulfilment, disputes — rather than a named individual.

You can also hand a conversation to the AI, or take one back from it. When the AI is handling a conversation the thread shows a banner saying so, with a Take Over from AI action; taking over stops the AI replying and puts you in control.

Snoozing

Snoozing hides a conversation until a time you choose — waiting on a carrier, waiting on a supplier, waiting for the customer to come back. It reappears in your queue at the wake time, or immediately if the customer replies in the meantime. Snoozed conversations live in Snoozed and My Snoozed, and Unsnooze pulls one back early.

Merging

Customers often start a second thread instead of replying to the first. Merge folds one conversation into another so the history reads in one place. The merge is recorded, and the merged conversation shows where its messages came from.

Tags

Tags are free-form labels for slicing your queue — returns, damaged, wholesale. Add them from the customer sidebar or let the AI apply them automatically. They are filterable, so tags plus saved views is how most teams build their working queues. Tags are shared across your organisation, not per user.

SLAs

If you have SLA policies configured, conversations carry a first-response target and a resolution target. When either is missed the conversation is flagged as breached, and the flags are filterable — so you can build a view of everything at risk and work it before it slips. SLA timers can be paused, so time spent waiting on the customer does not count against you.

Summarising

Long threads have a Summarize action in the header. It is the quickest way to pick up a conversation somebody else has been handling, or one that has run to dozens of messages.

Search

The search box at the top searches conversations, customers and settings. Searching for an order number or an email address is usually the fastest route to the thread you want.

Where to next

• The AI agent — how replies are drafted and what the AI is allowed to do.
• Live chat widget — putting chat on your storefront.
• Returns & refunds — approving refunds from a conversation.

Something behaving differently to what you read here? Email hello@squidsupport.ai with the ticket number and we will take a look.