What appears in Needs You
Entries fall into three families: decisions held for a person, operational problems stopping Connect working, and work only a person can do. Each carries the screen where it is resolved — a mailbox entry sends you to Mailboxes, a held reply to Waiting For You, a task to Follow-ups. None of them is dismissed; each clears when its cause does.
The three families#
| Entry | What it means | Where you go |
|---|---|---|
| A held reply | Prepared under ask_before_send and waiting on a yes or a no | Waiting For You, #/approvals |
| A queued call | An outbound call held for the same reason | Waiting For You, with the commitment it came from |
| A question for a person | Connect has asked something it cannot settle from Knowledge or Memory | The conversation or record it concerns |
| A mailbox needing attention | A connection or credential problem — mail is not being read | Mailboxes, #/mailboxes |
| An integration disconnected | A provider is no longer authorised | Integrations, #/integrations |
| Voice line health | The phone line is degraded or not ready | Phone, #/calls |
| A channel that cannot send | Permission exists; the provider cannot carry the message | The channel's own screen |
| A capacity stoppage | The day's ledger is spent, or the AI budget cannot cover more | Plan and Usage, #/billing |
| Work for a person to do | A follow-up on the task channel — nothing ever sends it | Follow-ups, #/follow-ups |
Decisions#
These are the entries most people picture when they hear about the list, and they are the only family with two buttons on them. A held reply and a queued call behave identically: the work is complete, nothing has been handed to a provider, and a person's yes releases it through the same path a person's own send would take.
A question for a person is a decision of a different shape. Connect raises one when the answer is genuinely not available to it — a commercial term nobody has written down, an instruction that contradicts what it already knows. Answering it in a durable place rather than in passing is what stops the same question returning.
Operational problems#
These have no decision attached at all. Nobody approves a disconnected mailbox; somebody reconnects it. They rank above decisions for a practical reason: while a mailbox is not being read, every reply prepared beneath it is being written from an incomplete picture of the conversation.
Work only a person can do#
Follow-ups carry a channel, and one of the available channels is task — work for a person, which nothing ever sends. It appears as work for a person to do on the follow-ups screen and surfaces here when it is due. That is the mechanism for a commitment Connect cannot keep itself: visiting a site, signing something, ringing somebody personally because the customer asked for a human.
Completing it on the follow-ups screen is what removes it. Because it has a due date, it is also subject to the ordering pressure a deadline creates — a task falling due today sits above a decision that could wait until tomorrow.
Questions#
Is this list of entries complete?
It is the set documented here, grouped as the product groups them. Because entries are derived from live state, the practical test is simpler than a list: anything that stops Connect working, or that only a person can settle, is meant to reach this screen.
Why is a billing matter in the same list as a draft reply?
Because both stop a customer getting an answer, and separating them by department would mean somebody has to check two screens to know whether today is going well. The ordering keeps the more costly one on top.
What is the difference between a question for a person and a held reply?
A held reply is finished work waiting for permission. A question is unfinished work waiting for information — answering it lets Connect continue, and writing the answer somewhere durable stops it being asked again.