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The shared team inbox is available on the Pro and Agency plans. Bulk Message does not include a 2-way inbox — it sends one-way broadcasts and campaigns only.
The shared team inbox — Notifyer Chat in the product — is where your team reads WhatsApp conversations in real time and replies as your business. This page walks through what a new team actually sees and does in there, not just the API fields behind it.
Bulk Message doesn’t include the shared 2-way inbox — it’s built for one-way broadcast sending. Upgrade to Pro or Agency to get it. Once you’re on Pro or Agency, the inbox lives in the left-side menu.
Whatsable left-side menu with Inbox selected and the conversation list, number filter, and label filters visible

On Pro and Agency, Inbox lives in the left-side menu — open it to see your conversation list

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First open: what you’ll see

The inbox is not pre-loaded with demo content. After you connect a WhatsApp number:
  • It shows only real conversations — no sample chats to click through.
  • It’s empty until a real customer messages you (or an import finishes — see below).
If you connect the number through Meta WhatsApp Coexistence during Embedded Signup, you can optionally import roughly the last 6 months of chat history from the WhatsApp Business app. That import can take hours to finish. If the inbox looks emptier than expected right after connecting, that’s usually the import still running — not a bug.

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Who sees what: access layers

Visibility in the inbox stacks in three layers, plain and simple:
1

Phone number

Which connected WhatsApp number (or numbers, on Agency) this person can work at all.
2

Role: Admin vs. chat-only

Admin can manage the account (billing, integrations, templates, other teammates). A chat-only teammate works conversations in the inbox without full account admin.
3

Label-scoped visibility

Within a number, a chat-only teammate can be further limited to only the conversations carrying certain labels — for example, only “Sales” or only “Support” chats.
Underneath, these map to real team roles: Admin, Team Member (All Labels), and Team Member (label-scoped). See team & roles for the API/Agent Skills view of the same roles.
Labels themselves can be created, assigned, or removed from several places — not only inside the inbox: the API, Agent Skills, Zapier, Make, and the proactive bot can all update a contact’s labels.
Mobile push notifications follow the same access rule: a teammate is notified only for chats they can access (their number + role + label scope) — not every chat on the account.
Whatsable Team page listing members with Owner, Admin, and Member roles plus numbers and conversation access

Team settings — role, which numbers someone can send from, and which conversations they can see

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Collaborating inside a conversation

Open a conversation and a few things are always available to your team:
  • Reassigning a chat, in practice, means changing its labels. There isn’t a separate “assign” button today — the way ownership and routing actually happens in the inbox is by adding or removing a label on the conversation (for example, swapping “Unassigned” for a teammate’s name label, or a routing label your automations watch for).
  • Let the agent reply. In the contact panel, this toggle controls whether the AI agent sends automatic replies on that chat. When it’s off — for example because a person replied — the bot stops immediately. Turn it on again to hand the conversation back to the agent. See AI Chatbots for bot assignment and other handoff settings.
  • A reply typed in the WhatsApp Business app also stops the bot — it’s treated as human, the same as turning off Let the agent reply. See Coexistence below for exactly what that looks like in the inbox.
If your workspace has webhook accounts wired up: turning off Let the agent reply (human takeover) pauses webhook pings on the bot path while the chat is in that state. It does not pause everything — CRM webhooks can still fire on that same chat. If a partner integration assumes “human mode = silence,” confirm which webhook path they’re listening on.
Whatsable inbox with an open thread, contact labels, and the Let the agent reply toggle in the contact panel

Open conversation — thread, contact labels, and Let the agent reply in the contact panel

Human and automation notes sit in the same contact panel (use the Internal note tab in the composer when replying). They are not shown as a separate screenshot here.

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Labels vs. notes

These look similar but do different jobs:

Labels

Organize and target. Labels group conversations (keyword labels, interest labels, teammate/routing labels) and are also what you aim a broadcast at — see Label Condition in the Zapier scheduling flow.

Notes

Give context, don’t organize. Notes come in two flavors: automation notes (form or Lead Ad field data pushed in via Zapier/Make so the bot has context) and human notes (a teammate’s own written context on the contact).
Setting either from outside the inbox: see Update a Contact in Zapier or Make, or assign-label.js / add-note.js in the chat-notifyer Agent Skill.
When an automation trigger fires (Zapier, Make, n8n), it carries the current labels and notes along with the conversation paragraph — roughly the last 20 messages of that chat. See the message webhook payload for the exact fields (labels, note, note_automation, last_messages).
Whatsable Labels settings page showing label names, keyword rules, and contact counts

Labels in Settings — categorize contacts, auto-apply by keyword, and use labels for broadcasts and inbox filters

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AI ↔ human resume behavior

What happens after a teammate takes over from the bot:
1

Turn off Let the agent reply

The bot stops immediately on that chat (a person replied, or you switched it off).
2

History stays

Nothing is lost — the full conversation history stays exactly as it was, bot messages and all.
3

When the agent may reply again

Open Once you reply by hand in Settings and choose when the agent may start replying again after a hand reply — one of the three options in the next section.
Once you reply by hand controls how long the agent stays quiet after you or a teammate reply by hand, before it answers on its own again. In Settings, pick one of:
  1. The agent stays off until someone turns it back on
  2. The agent resumes when the customer starts a new conversation
  3. The agent resumes after a set time
Whatsable setting Once you reply by hand with three resume options in the dropdown

Once you reply by hand — choose when the AI agent may start replying again after a human reply

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Coexistence: phone and inbox together

This is the exact, confirmed behavior when your number uses Meta WhatsApp Coexistence and a teammate is in the web inbox while someone replies from the WhatsApp Business app on the same number:
  • It’s the same customer thread in the web inbox — the sync is real time, not a delayed refresh.
  • The reply shows as coming from the WhatsApp Business app, not a named teammate. On the message webhook payload: send_by: "WhatsApp App", was_message_by_human: true, incoming_message: false.
  • That phone reply turns off Let the agent reply — the native AI stops auto-replying on that chat, the same as switching the toggle off in the inbox.
  • Make, Zapier, and n8n do not auto-pause just because of this. Your scenario keeps running unless you explicitly filter on the human / "WhatsApp App" signal — see filtering for phone-app replies.
  • Groups, Status, and Calls do not sync into the web inbox — only 1:1 WhatsApp conversations do.
What this does not do: it doesn’t change chat assignment, it doesn’t guarantee an unread badge fires, and it doesn’t require a hard refresh to see the new message. If you notice any of those, that’s a bug to report, not expected behavior.

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Agency: one number or many

If your Agency workspace manages more than one WhatsApp number, you have two ways to work them:
  • One shared view, filterable by number or by label — your team stays in a single inbox and uses the number dropdown (for example All numbers or one connected line) and the Labels filter on the list to narrow what they see, instead of switching accounts.
  • Per-customer logins — if you’d rather keep each client’s number and team fully separate, that’s supported too.

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Next steps

Connect a WhatsApp number

Complete Embedded Signup (with Coexistence support) before the inbox has any conversations to show.

AI Chatbots

Bot assignment, handoff keywords, and settings that work with Let the agent reply in the inbox.

Message webhooks

Full payload reference — send_by, note, note_automation, labels, last_messages.

chat-notifyer Agent Skill

Script-level operations for labels, handoff, notes, and conversation history.