Conversation
A conversation is one continuing exchange with one person on one channel, and it is the unit the Conversations screen lists whatever the channel was: an email thread, a WhatsApp exchange, an SMS exchange, a call. It is what Connect works on; a relationship is what it accumulates into.
Why the word is channel-agnostic#
Because the alternative is four vocabularies for the same activity. Email brings *threads*, telephony brings *calls*, messaging brings *chats*, and a person answering all three does not experience four different jobs. Connect keeps the channel-specific record — a thread has a subject and participants; a call has a transcript and a summary — and lists them together as conversations so that a working queue is one queue.
The canonical records underneath are shared across providers on purpose. What a provider adapter stored in the provider's own shape is bridged into canonical threads, messages and contacts, and the engine reads only the canonical side. That is why adding a mail provider changes nothing about how a conversation behaves downstream.
What belongs to one#
- Its messages, in order, including the ones Connect wrote.
- Its channel and the endpoint it arrived at — which mailbox, which number.
- Its person, resolved from the identity that sent it.
- Its triage state: priority, starred, deleted. Priority is not decoration — the engine reads it when it picks work, so correcting a conversation's priority changes what happens next.
- Anything prepared or held against it, including an approval waiting for a person.
Counts, filters and paging on the list are answered by the database rather than computed over a fetched slice of recent rows. The distinction is invisible on a small workspace and decides correctness on a large one — a slice-based list reports zero on a tab that has entries and shows an empty page five. Headline numbers that stop at the page size is the note on that class of defect.
Conversation, thread, call, relationship, chat#
| Term | Scope | Ends |
|---|---|---|
| Conversation | One exchange with one person on one channel | When the exchange stops; it can be reopened by a new message |
| Thread | The email-shaped conversation, joined by mail headers | Same, with mail's own joining rules |
| A call | One phone conversation, with a transcript and a summary | When the call ends |
| Relationship | Every conversation with a person or company, across channels and years | It does not |
| An Assistant chat tab | You talking to Connect | When you close the tab; each tab keeps its own state |
The last row causes real confusion, so it is worth being blunt: a tab in the Connect Assistant is not a conversation with a customer. It is your own working session with the product, and each tab keeps its own conversation, record, draft, files and scroll position. Nothing you say there is sent to anyone unless you ask for it to be.
The relationship row is the one that changes how you work. Looking at a conversation answers *what is happening now*; looking at the relationship, or at Customer 360, answers *what has happened with this person* — including the call they made last month that never touched this thread.
Questions#
Does one person have one conversation across channels?
No. Each channel keeps its own conversation; the person is what joins them. Their whole history in one view is Customer 360, built on the relationship rather than on any single exchange.
Is a phone call a conversation?
Yes, and it carries its own transcript and summary. It appears in the same working list and on the person's timeline alongside their email.
What happens to a conversation I delete?
Deleting is a triage state on the record rather than an erasure — the same mechanism as starring and priority. The accountability trail is separate and is not affected by tidying a list.