The nine words you need first
Nine words carry most of Connect: Workspace, Needs You, Autonomy, Approval, Standing Instruction, Knowledge, Memory, Follow-up and Prospect. Learn the three pairs people confuse — knowledge against memory, approval against instruction, prospect against person — and the rest of the documentation stops needing a translation.
Where everything lives#
- Workspace
- The boundary every record belongs to. One business, one workspace; isolation between workspaces is enforced three separate times, in the middleware, in the ORM and in the database itself. If you are wondering whether somebody else can see your data, this is the word that answers it.
- Needs You
- The single queue of decisions, approvals and operational problems waiting on a person, ranked rather than in date order. It is the screen a working day starts on, and it drains itself as causes clear.
The three about control#
- Autonomy
- The rule for what Connect may do without asking, set per channel and resolvable at four scopes — contact, endpoint, channel, workspace — with the narrowest winning. Four modes:
off,draft_only,ask_before_send,autonomous. - Approval
- One held action waiting for a person's yes or no. An approval is about a single message; it releases that message and nothing else.
- Standing Instruction
- A durable direction you give Connect — how to write, what to always mention, what never to promise. Where an approval settles one message, a standing instruction changes the next hundred.
The distinction between the last two is the most expensive one to miss. People spend weeks editing the same sentence out of every draft, one approval at a time, when a single instruction would have removed it permanently.
The four about knowing and doing#
- Knowledge
- Source material your business supplies, which answers are grounded in. It applies to everyone. A Fact is one grounded statement extracted from Knowledge or a conversation.
- Memory
- What Connect knows about your business and its people, held at four tiers — workspace, channel, endpoint, contact — and applying only as widely as its tier. Readable and erasable at every tier.
- Follow-up
- A dated commitment on a channel, with the reason attached. The
taskchannel is the version nothing automatic ever sends, because it is work for a person. - Prospect
- An organisation or person found by research and not yet a relationship. A Person, by contrast, is a human already in your relationships — however many addresses and numbers they use, they are one record.
The three pairs people mix up#
| Not this | But this | Consequence of confusing them |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge | Memory | A fact about one customer written into Knowledge starts shaping replies to everyone |
| Approval | Standing Instruction | The same correction is made by hand for weeks instead of once |
| Prospect | Person | A customer you already have is approached as a stranger |
Words this manual is careful about#
- Connect is the product, and Connect Assistant is the part of it you converse with. Neither is 'the bot'.
- Available, foundation and not yet are statuses with fixed meanings — foundation means the model and service exist while the usable capability is deliberately narrower, and it is never a synonym for available.
- Sent means a provider acknowledged it. Before that acknowledgement the state is uncertain, and this manual does not use the two words interchangeably.
- Digital Business Employee is the category: one worker that communicates, remembers and follows through across channels, rather than a tool per channel.
Questions#
Which word should I learn first if I only learn one?
Autonomy. It decides what happens to everything Connect writes, and almost every 'why did it not send' question is answered by knowing which mode applies at which scope. Needs You is a close second, because that is where the consequences of your autonomy choice appear.
Is Knowledge the same as a knowledge base?
Close enough to start with, and different in one way that matters: what is selected from it is budgeted before it reaches the model, so adding volume does not add proportional influence. Short, precise entries beat long documents.
Where do I look up a term that is not here?
The full Glossary carries the rest, including the technical vocabulary this page deliberately leaves out. These nine are the ones you need before you can read anything else usefully.