Customer conversations arrive in one place and are answered from one place, whichever channel they came in on. The Inbox tab is the unified inbox; Live Chat, SMS and the phone button cover the real-time channels.
The inbox
The Inbox tab is titled Communications. It shows Conversations (one thread per contact and channel) or All Messages (every message, newest first). Channel chips narrow it to email, SMS, WhatsApp, internal notes or website messages.
Open a thread to read it and reply in the same channel. Older messages load as you scroll up. Unread state is per thread, and the badge on the tab counts unread threads.
| Channel | Reply with |
|---|---|
| The rich-text composer — formatting, links, attachments | |
| SMS / WhatsApp | The SMS composer, from one of the organization's numbers |
| Website | A reply that reaches the visitor's chat widget |
| Internal | A note only staff see |
Replies are sent through the platform, so they are logged against the customer and appear in the web inbox too.
Filtering by channel
The chips run All · Email · SMS · WhatsApp · Facebook · Instagram · Twitter · LinkedIn · Internal · Website, each showing a count only when it has traffic. They are multi-select: tap two and you see both. Tapping All while it is already on clears the selection, and turning off the last specific channel drops you back to All.
The chips filter Conversations only. All Messages ignores them and always shows everything.
Rows in All Messages cannot be tapped. Use it to scan what has come in; switch to Conversations to open a thread and reply.
Replying to a thread
Open the thread from Conversations. The header shows the participant and the message count; Load older messages at the top pulls in history beyond the first page.
Type in the rich-text box and tap the send arrow — there is no "Send" label here, just the paper-plane icon. The reply goes out on the same channel as the newest message in the thread and is subjected as Re: that message. You will see Message sent successfully!; a failure reads Failed to send: …. An empty box does nothing at all when tapped.
Starting a new message
New, bottom right, offers Email, SMS, WhatsApp and Internal. Live Chat is deliberately absent — it is a real-time visitor channel, not something you start from an async inbox.
WhatsApp and Internal open a plain composer: To (a recipient, or a user email/ID for Internal), an optional Subject, and Message. Send stays disabled until both To and Message have something in them, then confirms WhatsApp sent or Internal Message sent.
Live-chat sessions and assistant messages have their own screens. The inbox filters them out so an email thread is not buried under a bot transcript.
New → Email opens the full composer: To (type it, or tap the contacts icon to pick someone with an email on file), Subject, and a rich-text body with a formatting toolbar. Send stays greyed out until all three have content — unlike SMS, it will not let you send half a message.
Success reads Email sent successfully!. A failure reads Failed to send email: … with the reason attached.
The dedicated email composer can fail on send with a provider error even when the address and content are fine. Replying to an existing email thread from Conversations is unaffected and is the reliable path today. If you hit it, reply in-thread or send from the web inbox.
SMS
SMS on the home screen (also under More) lists every text conversation on the organization's numbers, across staff. Threads are grouped by the other party's number; your own outbound messages are prefixed You: in the preview, and a thread with more than one message shows a count.
Tapping a thread opens the composer with that number filled in — there is no separate read-only thread view, so you always land somewhere you can reply from.
To send one:
- Tap the compose icon (top right of the SMS list), or New → SMS from the inbox.
- Type the number, or tap the contacts icon — the picker lists only contacts that have a phone number.
- Type the message and tap Send.
You will see SMS sent successfully and the screen closes. Anything that goes wrong reads Failed to send SMS, with no further detail — see the troubleshooting table below for what that one string can actually mean.
The Send button enables as soon as the message body has text, whether or not the To field is filled. Tapping it with no recipient does nothing and shows no error. If Send appears to do nothing, check the To field first.
Sending needs an SMS-capable number configured for the organization; see the phone setup.
Live chat
Live Chat is the agent console for the website chat widget and the AI assistant that fronts it. Reach it from More → Live Chat or the Live Chat tile on the dashboard. Its tabs:
| Tab | What it is |
|---|---|
| Inbox | Chats assigned to you |
| Queue | Visitors waiting for a human; Pick Next takes the oldest |
| AI Chats | Conversations the assistant is handling right now |
| Customers | Who is online, and their journey |
| Agents | Who else is on, and their status |
The dot beside the Chat title is the console's connection: green means the live socket is up, red means it is not. Everything in this console runs over that socket — status changes, takeover, transfer, ending a chat — and when it is red those actions do nothing and say nothing. Check the dot before you conclude a button is broken.
Setting your status
Tap the status chip beside the title and pick Available, Busy or Away. Routing only offers a chat to agents who are available, including someone covering from a phone.
The chip only updates once the server confirms it. If the label does not change, the change did not land — look at the connection dot.
Taking the next visitor in the queue
Queue tab → Pick Next. The server picks the longest-waiting visitor and the app opens that conversation. Rows in the queue also carry a Pick Up button and, where relevant, an AI HANDOFF badge meaning the assistant asked for a human.
Two things to know: Pick Up on a row does not reserve that row — it asks the server for the next visitor exactly as Pick Next does. And when the queue is empty, or the pick fails, nothing at all happens on screen. An unresponsive Pick Next usually means the queue just emptied.
Remove on a row drops a visitor from the queue without taking them.
Working a conversation
Inside a conversation the header subtitle tells you who is driving: AI handling, typing…, or online. While the assistant has the chat, a blue banner reads AI is handling this conversation with a Takeover button in it.
The ⋮ menu holds the rest:
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Takeover from AI | You take the conversation. Shown only while AI has it. |
| Resume AI | Hands the visitor back to the assistant. Replaces Takeover once you have it. |
| Assist AI | Give the assistant an instruction — it drafts, the visitor sees the result. |
| Transfer Chat | Pass it to another agent by email address. |
| End Chat | Closes the conversation, after a confirmation. |
Transfer asks only for an agent's email and closes both the dialog and the conversation on tap. There is no validation and no confirmation message, so a mistyped address looks identical to a successful transfer — check with the person you meant to hand it to.
End Chat is the one action here that asks first: Are you sure you want to end this conversation?
For a staff-to-staff chat the ⋮ menu is shorter — only Transfer Chat works; Contact Info is present but does nothing.
Attachments go through the paperclip: Photo from Gallery, Take Photo, File. A failed upload is the only thing this screen reports, as Upload failed: ….
Messages the assistant wrote are labelled AI Assistant in the thread, and system events — a transfer, a customer leaving — appear as grey centred lines.
What pops up while you work
Toasts from the chat system, so you do not have to watch the console:
- New chat from
— suppressed if you are already looking at that person. - Chat transferred from
, with the sender's note if they left one. - Chat ended by Customer / System /
, with a reason where there is one. joined the queue .
Live Presence
Live Presence (More → Live Presence) is the manager's board: agents online with their status, visitors online, and the queue. The header carries Available, Busy, Away, Customers, Queue, Oldest wait and Avg handle; a dash means the figure is not available rather than zero.
An admin can override someone else's status from the ⋮ on their row: Set Available, Set Busy, Set Away — useful when an agent has walked away without setting themselves Away and chats are routing into a void. Remove on a queue row drops a waiting visitor.
Live Presence loads once when you open it. Use the refresh icon to bring it up to date — a stale queue length here is the usual cause of "the board says three waiting and there are none".
Also note the dot beside an agent is connected devices, not status. Someone can read AVAILABLE with a grey dot, which means they set themselves available and then closed the app — those chats will sit unanswered.
Calls
The phone button in the middle of the tab bar opens the softphone: Keypad, Recent (calls, SMS and recordings from the platform's communications log) and Contacts.
Calls run through the organization's numbers, not your personal one. The app registers this device for voice and SMS when you sign in and keeps that registration alive with a heartbeat; an incoming call rings the phone through the platform's push channel.
Making a call
- Open the phone screen. Check the dot beside Phone is green — that is your device registration.
- If you have more than one number available, pick the From number. Entries are marked • yours (assigned to you) or • team (a group number you share).
- Type the number on the keypad. Long-press 0 for +.
- Tap the green call button.
The in-call panel shows Connecting… → Ringing… → On Call with a timer, and mute and speaker appear once connected. It cannot be dismissed by tapping outside — end the call to close it.
Incoming calls are handled by the phone's own call screen (CallKit on iPhone, the system dialer on Android); the app's in-call panel appears once you have answered.
Going offline
The power icon at the top right of the Phone screen toggles whether this device rings:
- You're offline — not receiving calls on this device
- You're online — receiving calls
The choice is remembered across app restarts and sign-ins, and it is the only place it exists — there is nothing in Settings. If your phone stopped ringing after a shift, this is the first thing to check.
Note this is separate from your chat status. Being Available in Live Chat does not make your phone ring, and going offline here does not change your chat status.
Permissions
The first time you open the Phone screen the app asks for the microphone, phone-state and call permissions it needs. Grant them there; declining does not produce a prompt later — instead a red line appears under the dial pad naming exactly which permission is missing and where to enable it.
On Android the call also needs Appmint Mobile enabled under Settings → Default apps → Calling accounts. When it is not, the app shows an Open Calling Accounts button that takes you straight there.
A few more things about how it behaves:
- The device is bound to the organization you are signed into. Switch organizations and it re-registers, so you do not receive calls for an organization you have left.
- With no phone number assigned to your account, the dial pad, SMS and call buttons are all disabled and the screen says so. An admin assigns a number to your user or your team group.
- On iPad the native calling layer is not registered — CallKit and the VoIP push it relies on are iPhone features. The device still registers (so SMS and the rest of the app work) and the dot still goes green, but calls will not ring or place on an iPad, and nothing on screen says so. Use an iPhone or an Android device for calls.
- Recordings and voicemail appear under Recent where the organization has them enabled.
Decline either at the prompt and the phone will register but never ring. Fix it in the operating system's app settings.
Notifications
The badge on the Inbox tab and the toasts that pop while you work come from the app's live connections. The Notifications entry under More is a placeholder today — tapping it does nothing, and there is no notification history to look back at. If you miss a toast, the message itself is still in the Inbox and the call is still under Recent.
When something goes wrong
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Failed to send SMS | Covers every failure: no number assigned to you, the org has no SMS-capable number, the recipient is malformed, or the network dropped | Check a number is shown on the Phone keypad. If not, an admin must assign one. Otherwise retry, then send from the web inbox. |
| Send does nothing on an SMS | The To field is empty | Fill in the recipient. The button enables on message text alone. |
| Failed to send email: … from the email composer | Known issue in the standalone composer | Reply from the thread in Conversations instead, or send from the web. |
| Chat status will not change | The chat socket is down (red dot by Chat) | Pull to refresh the console, or leave and reopen it. Nothing in the console works while the dot is red. |
| Takeover / Transfer / End Chat appear to do nothing | Same cause — the socket is down | As above. Check the dot before retrying. |
| Pick Next does nothing | The queue is empty, or the pick failed | Check the Queue tab count. There is no message either way. |
| A transfer went nowhere | The agent email was wrong; nothing validates it | Confirm the address with the agent and transfer again. |
| AI Chats list is empty and never loads | The console opened before the socket connected | Refresh the console. |
| Live Presence figures look stale | The board does not poll | Tap refresh. |
| An agent shows AVAILABLE with a grey dot | They set themselves available then closed the app | Set them Away from the row's ⋮ so chats stop routing to them. |
| Phone dot is red | Device not registered | Sign out and back in. On iPad, registration succeeds but calling never works. |
| Phone never rings | You are offline on this device, or a permission is missing | Tap the power icon on the Phone screen; check the red line under the dial pad. |
| Red line under the dial pad naming a permission | That permission was declined | Enable it in the OS app settings, then reopen the Phone screen. |
| Phone account is registered but not enabled | Android has not been told the app may place calls | Tap Open Calling Accounts and toggle Appmint Mobile on. |
| No phone number assigned to your account | Nothing assigned to you or your group | An admin assigns a number to your user profile or team group. |
| Session expired. Please sign in again. | Your token lapsed | Sign in again; you land back on the login screen with your org remembered. |