Every person in your account has exactly one role. There are two built-in roles — administrator and agent — and, on paid plans, custom roles you define yourself. You choose one of the three when you add the person; they do not stack.
Administrator and agent
| Administrator | Agent | |
|---|---|---|
| Settings and billing | all of them | none |
| Conversations | every conversation in every inbox, without being a collaborator | only inboxes they are a collaborator on |
| Contacts, canned responses, macros | yes | yes |
| Reports | yes | no |
The important line is the second one. An administrator sees everything without being added anywhere. An agent sees only what inbox membership gives them, which is why Set up an inbox matters as much as the role does.
Custom roles
A custom role is an agent with a chosen subset of permissions. The list is fixed — you pick from it, you cannot extend it. These are the six options, named as the product names them:
| Permission | What it grants |
|---|---|
| Manage all conversations | every conversation in the inboxes they are a collaborator on |
| Manage unassigned conversations and those assigned to them | the unassigned queue, plus their own |
| Manage participating conversations and those assigned to them | their own, plus ones they are a participant in |
| Manage contacts | contacts |
| Manage reports | reports, including satisfaction responses |
| Manage store orders (status changes, resend store emails) | the order actions short of cancelling and refunding |
The three conversation permissions are a hierarchy, not a set. The widest one you grant wins, so granting all three is the same as granting the first. A custom role with no conversation permission sees no conversations at all — a legitimate choice for a bookkeeper, but easy to do by accident.
One permission stops short of where people expect. Manage store orders covers status changes and resending the store's own emails. Cancelling and refunding are administrator-only and cannot be granted to any custom role.
Lynomia Chat publishes the documentation itself, so there is no workspace knowledge base and no permission for one. A role created before that change keeps a Manage knowledge base entry on its record, where it now grants nothing. See Documentation and support.
What is not on the list
This is the most useful thing to know before you plan a role. The permission list has no entry for:
inboxes and channels · campaigns · WhatsApp templates · flows · automation rules · audiences · labels · custom attributes · agents and roles themselves · billing · audit logs
Those are administrator-only, with no middle ground. If someone needs to connect a channel, build an automation rule, submit a WhatsApp template or send a campaign, they have to be an administrator.
What you need first
An administrator account. Custom roles are a paid capability — on a plan without them the Custom Roles page is not shown.
Steps
- Go to Settings → Custom Roles and add a role. Give it a name and a description.
- Tick the permissions it should carry, picking one conversation permission. Save.
- Go to Settings → Agents, open the person, and choose the custom role in place of administrator or agent.
- Add them as a collaborator on the inboxes they should work in. The role decides what they may do; inbox membership decides what they can see.
A worked example
A retailer in Riyadh wants a part-time staff member who handles the order side of WhatsApp conversations and nothing else. The role gets Manage unassigned conversations and those assigned to them so she can pick work up from the queue, plus Manage contacts and Manage store orders. She is added as a collaborator on the WhatsApp inbox only.
The result: she can take an unassigned conversation, read the customer's record, change an order's status and resend the store's confirmation email. She cannot refund, cannot see the other inboxes, and cannot see settings.
Who can do this
Administrators. Creating custom roles, changing anyone's role and managing agents are all administrator jobs.
Limits
- One role per person per account. A custom role replaces the agent role; it is not added on top of administrator.
- The permission list is fixed at the six entries above and cannot be extended.
- Refunds and cancellations are never delegable.
- Permissions are account-wide, not per inbox. You cannot grant "manage all conversations, but only in the Sales inbox" — restrict that with inbox membership instead.
- There is no read-only role. The narrowest useful role is one of the conversation permissions.
Related
If it does not work
A custom role sees no conversations. It has no conversation permission, or the person is not a collaborator on any inbox. Both are required.
The Custom Roles page is not in settings. Custom roles are not included on your plan, or you are signed in as an agent.
Someone with Manage store orders cannot refund. That is the rule, not a fault. Refunds and cancellations need an administrator.