Work with the Front Desk in the Inbox

The Front Desk is the AI in your Inbox. It answers customers on WhatsApp, e-mail and your website's chat from your own answers, knowledge and records, or writes drafts for your team. Everything it writes is labelled AI, and a person can take over at any moment. WhatsApp needs your organisation's own WhatsApp Business account.

Before you start

• You need Reply to customers in the inbox.
• How the Front Desk answers on WhatsApp is set in Front desk settings (see choose how the Front Desk answers). On e-mail and the web chat it follows each team's AI mode (e-mail, web chat) in Inbox settings.

Steps

1. Open Inbox. Conversations where the Front Desk is active show an AI badge in the list.
2. Open one. A bar says The AI front desk works here with its mode, and its messages are marked AI.
3. If the Front Desk wrote an AI draft, read it and edit the text if needed.
4. If the draft states prices or amounts that Kluvan could not find in your records, tick I checked these figures: … after checking them.
5. Select Send to send the draft, or Discard to drop it.
6. To answer yourself, select Take over. The bar changes to The AI is paused in this conversation: the team answers here. Sending a reply yourself also takes it over.
7. When the customer no longer needs a person, select Return to the assistant.

Good to know

• The AI never talks over a person. Once someone takes over or replies, the Front Desk stays quiet in that conversation until Return to the assistant. Closing the conversation does not give it back.
• Hand-overs. When the Front Desk passes a customer to the team, the owner (or the team lead) gets a notice "The Front Desk (AI) passed … to the team", and the response deadline keeps running.
• E-mail and web chat. There the Front Desk follows the team's AI mode (e-mail, web chat): it answers, writes drafts or stays off. See let the Front Desk answer e-mail and web chat.
• Who answers. On the Front desk page each conversation shows Who answers: the assistant, a person of the team, waiting for a person, or nobody (paused). See take and give back a hand-off.
• Auto-replies (out-of-office mail, newsletters) are never answered by the Front Desk.
• Figures it cannot back up cannot be sent with one click: the tick is required.
• The WhatsApp page. Front desk in the Inbox sidebar keeps the WhatsApp view with team cases; see take over a WhatsApp conversation and work team cases.