What the labels in the chat inbox mean

The left rail: Shops

Each shop you work is a line in the rail. The coloured numbers beside it:

• Red - customers waiting on that shop.
• Amber - guests waiting: people who wrote without being logged in.
• Blue - conversations active on that shop, being answered by somebody.

Under the shop that is open, a small table shows the same numbers per channel: website, WhatsApp and email. The squares you light are the filter. Light several shops and each one shows its own row, so one channel can be watched across all of them.

The left rail: Agents

Whoever oversees chat sees the agents down the side: who is there, who is on a phone call, and how many conversations each is holding. Picking an agent shows what they are holding, across every shop.

The left rail: Folders

• Unclaimed (the bell) - conversations nobody has taken, past the agreed time for their channel: 2 minutes on the website, 30 minutes on WhatsApp, 2 hours on email. A shop can be given its own times in its chat settings. The list covers every shop, every organisation and every channel, and everyone who works chat sees it, supervisors too. A conversation held by an agent who went home counts as not taken and comes back here. It leaves the list the moment somebody takes it. The red number is how many are waiting.
• Spam - conversations marked as spam, by an agent or automatically. The grey number is how much there is to clear out, never anything urgent. Not spam puts one back.
• Ignored - conversations put aside because they are not work: an out-of-office, a bounce, a newsletter reply. Each one says why. Not ignored puts it back in the queue.
• Trash - conversations moved to the bin by hand. Nothing is deleted; Restore brings one back.
• Highlighted (the star) - conversations somebody starred to find again. The star is on the conversation, so colleagues see it too.

Above the list: whose it is

• My Chats - the conversations you are holding. The number is how many.
• Colleagues' Chats - conversations somebody else is holding, on a shop you also work. An amber number here means a colleague has unread messages; Take Over to answer them.
• Everybody's conversations - what a supervisor sees instead of the two tabs: every conversation on the shops they oversee.
• Selected shops - shown when several shops are lit at once.

Above the list: how far along it is

• Waiting - nobody has picked it up yet. The oldest is at the top, so the customer who has waited longest is answered first.
• Active - somebody is holding it and answering.
• Closed - closed today. A closed conversation is never deleted and stays on the customer's record.

Customers and Guests split the list between people we know and people who wrote without logging in.

Tags on a conversation

• Probably and a name - a guest who looks like one of our customers, from the email, order number or phone number they gave. It is a suggestion: Confirm or Not them in the side panel.
• Possible noise - it might be automatic mail, but it was not certain enough to move. It stays in the queue for a person to decide.
• Put aside automatically - moved to Ignored or Spam by the system, with the reason. One click brings it back.
• Priority - Urgent, High, Normal or Low, set from the conversation's menu. Normal unless somebody changes it.
• A number on the right - unread messages in that conversation.

Labels on a message

• Offline message - the customer wrote it in the website widget outside working hours. When the shop has Answer offline messages by email switched on, the whole conversation is moved to the email channel so the answer reaches them, which is why a website visitor can turn up in the email list. The label is on the message only; the row in the list has no mark. See Live chat on the website.
• Amber note: Gmail put this email in its spam folder - aiku took this email out of Gmail's spam because it looks like a real customer. The note starts with what aiku took it for, such as New customer enquiry, and a red Possible scam tag when the email looks like a common scam. Its attachments stay in Gmail for safety until you click Show attachments. See Answering emails in Chat.

Your own state

• You are on a phone call - a call is running, so no new conversation is handed to you until it ends.
• On a phone call, taking no new conversations - the same, shown beside a colleague.

Folders in the shop's Gmail

aiku reads the shop's Gmail inbox and files every mail it has read into a folder of its own:

• aiku/imported - mail from a known customer. It is in the chat inbox.
• aiku/unmatched - mail from somebody we could not match to a customer. It is in the chat inbox as a guest.
• aiku/filtered - mail that is not work: from our own staff and shop addresses, no-reply senders, bounces, delivery reports, and out-of-office replies to mail we never sent. It is not in the chat inbox.
• aiku/spam - mail from senders blocked with Report spam. It is not in the chat inbox.
• aiku/spam-checked - mail in Gmail's own Spam folder that aiku read and left there, because it did not look like a customer. It is not in the chat inbox, and Gmail deletes it after 30 days.

Once filed, the mail leaves the Gmail inbox and is marked as read, so an empty Gmail inbox is normal, not lost mail. Nothing is deleted: when a mail seems missing, look in aiku/filtered first.

aiku also reads Gmail's own Spam folder, but takes from it only mail from customers who have bought, replies in our conversations, and mail that looks like a customer or a new customer writing. Everything else stays in Gmail's Spam, where Gmail deletes it after 30 days - see Answering emails in Chat. Mail that a Gmail filter moves past the inbox never reaches aiku. Colleagues should write to each other directly, not through a shop mailbox: their mail is filtered.

The full guide to the inbox is Talking to customers in Chat.