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The Switchbord Inbox is more than just a chat interface; it’s a high-performance tool for customer relationship management.

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Media and Attachments

Support for rich media allows agents to provide comprehensive support:
  • Image/Video Support: Inline rendering of received media.
  • Document Sending: Share PDFs, receipts, or manuals directly in the chat.
  • Voice Messages: Listen to customer voice notes directly within the inbox.
  • Drag-and-Drop: Easily upload attachments by dragging them into the composer.

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Advanced Search and Filtering

Find exactly what you need in seconds, even across thousands of conversations. Search for keywords across all message histories. The engine indexes both incoming and outgoing messages for rapid retrieval.

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Conversation Filtering

Filter the inbox view by:
  • Assignee: View chats handled by specific team members.
  • Tags: Drill down into segments (e.g., “Urgent”, “Lead”).
  • Status: Toggle between Open, Pending, and Resolved states.
  • Unread / Unresponded: Focus the list on threads that still require operator attention.
  • Groups: Show only metadata-backed WhatsApp group conversations, useful for internal team pilots and tourism cohort operations.
  • Last Interaction: Find conversations that have been idle for a specific duration.

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WhatsApp group conversations

Switchbord can mark conversations as groups through conversations.metadata and expose them in the inbox via a Groups pill next to the conversation filters. This first release is a visibility and filtering foundation: full group lifecycle management, participant management, invite-link controls, and group-specific send constraints remain follow-up work.

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Connection health

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Realtime keepalive and the connection banner

The inbox depends on a persistent Supabase Realtime WebSocket to show inbound messages live. Backgrounded or sleeping browser tabs throttle timers and the OS can drop that socket without the tab noticing — the classic “the app looks down until I hard-refresh” failure. A useRealtimeKeepalive hook now keeps the connection honest:
  • On tab wake (visibilitychange → visible, window focus, or the browser’s online event) it reconnects the realtime socket and channels if they’re unhealthy, and always runs a catch-up refetch of conversations plus the open thread — a slept tab has usually missed events even if the socket itself survived.
  • A heartbeat check every 20 seconds, only while the tab is visible, verifies the socket still reports connected. If not, it recovers automatically — the connection can’t silently stay dead indefinitely.
  • Wake bursts are debounced into a single recovery pass, since visibilitychange, focus, and online often fire together.
The inbox surfaces this state through a non-silent banner above the conversation list, localized in all 7 app locales:
The whole point of this feature is that the inbox must never appear live while actually disconnected. If you see stale conversations with no banner, that’s a bug — file it rather than assuming a hard refresh fixed something silently broken.

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Persisted conversation tabs

Above the chat pane, the inbox keeps Chrome-style tabs for the conversations an operator has open — so switching between a handful of active threads doesn’t require going back to the sidebar every time.
  • Tabs are capped at 8 — opening a ninth conversation drops the oldest tab.
  • Since v0.18.14/v0.18.22, tabs persist across refresh (manual F5, a server-component refresh, or a realtime-driven remount) via localStorage, namespaced per workspace (switchbord.inbox.tabs.<workspaceId>) so tabs never bleed between workspaces. Reads/writes are SSR-safe and tolerant of corrupt or empty stored values.
  • A tab whose conversation has unread inbound messages gets the same emerald highlight as an unread row in the conversation list — fill, a top-edge accent, an emerald dot, and a bolded title. The active tab never shows unread (viewing a conversation clears it).
  • Each tab also carries that conversation’s live GB-Agent “Draft with me” status badge (violet/pulsing while generating, green when ready, amber on handoff, red on failure, hidden when idle) — see gb-agent Connector → Draft with me for the full status-badge semantics.

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CRM Integration

The Inbox is tightly integrated with the contact database:
  • Contact Sidebar: View detailed customer profiles, including custom fields and past activity, without leaving the conversation.
  • Tag Management: Add or remove tags in real-time to update a contact’s segment.
  • Avatar Resolution: Automatically pulls avatars from public profiles or CRM integrations to help agents recognize frequent contacts.

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Productivity Tools

  • Quick Replies: Pre-defined templates for common questions to ensure fast, consistent responses.
  • Internal Notes: Leave private comments for other team members within a conversation thread.
  • Assignment Logic: Manually or automatically route conversations to the right agent or team.