Plan requirement
| Subscription | x-bees Basic or higher, x-bees Standard or higher (guests) |
Conversations are where work happens in x-bees. Start one with colleagues, then add customers as guests when you need them.
Start a conversation
- Click New conversation.
- Search for a colleague by name, or type a phone number.
- Select the person and start typing.
Search covers your colleagues, your phonebook and, if a CRM integration is active, your CRM contacts.
Add a guest
A guest is someone outside your PBX: a customer, a supplier, a candidate. They do not need a subscription and they do not need to install anything.
- Open the conversation.
- Click Add member.
- Enter their email address. An address is required; without one somebody cannot be added at all.
- Decide about Hide history before you confirm. See the next section.
The guest gets an invitation and joins in the browser. They can chat, join video conferences, and invite other people into the same conversation.
Adding guests needs x-bees Standard or higher. On x-bees Basic the option is not available, which is the usual reason someone cannot invite a customer.
What a guest can and cannot do
- Can chat, join video conferences, and add other members.
- Cannot see your internal channels, your colleagues list, or anything they were not invited to.
Later members do not become searchable
One limitation applies once a conversation grows. Search finds a conversation by its initial members. Add a guest or a colleague afterwards and you still cannot find it by typing that person's name, however long they have been in it.
So the people who started a conversation decide how it will be found later. Where a thread is likely to be looked up by the customer's name, add them at the start rather than once the internal discussion is finished.
What a guest sees of the history
Everything, unless you say otherwise. Someone added to an existing conversation can scroll back through what was said before they arrived, which is the opposite of what most people assume.
The control is the Hide history toggle on the Add Members screen, and it is off until you switch it on. It also cannot be applied afterwards: to hide the earlier messages from someone already in the conversation you have to remove them and add them again with the toggle on.
One exception: someone who joins through a link rather than by being added sees the history either way. Hide history has no effect on link joins.
So read back through a thread before you add a customer to it. An internal conversation about a customer becomes visible to that customer the moment you add them.
There is a second setting in the same territory. Under Edit conversation, Available by link makes a conversation open to anyone holding its link, invited or not. Conversations that a customer starts themselves, through your contact-me link or a website widget, are available by link from the start.
SMS is different
External people cannot be added to an SMS conversation the way they can to a normal one. SMS is between you and one number.
Files and history
Drag a file into the conversation, or use Add files. Everything stays in the conversation, so a customer thread keeps its own context instead of scattering across email.
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