Workspace and team
Inboxes, teams, and who can do what.
Set up an inbox
An inbox is one channel plus everything that governs it: who works in it, when you are open, what a first-time customer is told, and whether satisfaction is asked for. The channel is the connection to the outside world; the inbox is the set of decisions you make about it. This matters because most of the settings people look for in account settings are not there. They are per inbox. Two WhatsApp numbers can keep different hours, different greetings and different staff. The channels you can connect Nine are always offered: Website (a live-chat widget), WhatsApp, Email, SMS (through Twilio or Bandwidth), Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Line and API for your own application. TikTok appears only where it has been configured on the installation, and Voice and WhatsApp calling depend on being switched on for your account. Connecting the channel itself is covered in Connect your first channel. What you need first An administrator account, and a connected channel. An inbox cannot exist without one. The settings each inbox carries Open Settings → Inboxes, pick the inbox, and work through its tabs. | Tab | What it decides | |---|---| | Settings | name, logo, greeting message, and channel-specific options | | Collaborators | which agents work here, and whether auto-assignment is on | | Business Hours | your timezone, your weekly schedule, and the reply sent when you are closed | | CSAT | whether a satisfaction survey is sent when a conversation is resolved | Other tabs appear only where they apply: Pre Chat Form for a website widget, Configuration for channels that hold credentials, Bot Configuration where agent bots are enabled, Account Health for WhatsApp and Twilio, and Voice or Calls where calling is switched on. Business hours Business hours are off by default, and a new inbox is created on UTC time. The default schedule is Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:00, with Saturday and Sunday closed — which is wrong for most of the Gulf, where the working week usually runs Sunday to Thursday. Set the timezone and the days before you switch the feature on. When business hours are on and you are currently closed, an incoming message gets your unavailable message. It is sent at most once a day in any one conversation, and it is not sent if an agent sent a public reply in the last five minutes, so a conversation that is still live at closing time is not interrupted. Business hours drive that one automatic reply and the hours shown on a website widget. They are not available anywhere else. There is no business-hours or time-of-day condition in automation rules, so out-of-hours routing cannot be built. The greeting The greeting is also off by default. When it is on, it is sent once — on the contact's first message in a conversation — and never on a conversation created by a campaign. Out of hours you get the unavailable message instead of the greeting, not both. A worked example A clinic in Kuwait runs one WhatsApp inbox. It sets the timezone to Asia/Kuwait, opens Sunday to Thursday 08:00 to 20:00, and closes Friday and Saturday. The unavailable message says the clinic is closed and will answer the next working morning. The greeting is left off: the unavailable message already covers the case that matters, and a greeting on every first message would only add noise during opening hours. Who can do this Administrators only. Agents cannot open inbox settings. The permission list behind a custom role has no entry for inboxes or channels, so this cannot be delegated — see Roles and permissions. Limits - A new inbox is on UTC until you change it, and business hours are evaluated in the inbox's timezone. - Closing time must be later than opening time on the same day. Hours that run past midnight cannot be expressed. - "All day" means 00:00 to 23:59, not a true 24 hours. - The unavailable message goes out on every channel, not only the website widget, even though its help text mentions live chat. - Greeting and unavailable messages are capped at 10,000 characters each. - CSAT on WhatsApp needs a template approved by Meta before it can be sent. - Auto-assignment is on for a new inbox and only considers agents who are online. Related - Connect your first channel - Connect WhatsApp - Teams and agents - Assign and prioritise If it does not work The unavailable message is sent at the wrong time. The inbox timezone is still UTC, or the schedule follows a Monday-to-Friday week it should not. Nobody is getting the unavailable message. Check that business hours are switched on, that today is marked closed, and that the message field is not empty. All three are required. The greeting never arrives. It is sent only on the contact's first message in a conversation. On an existing conversation, or out of hours, it does not send. An agent cannot see the inbox's conversations. They are not a collaborator. Add them on the Collaborators tab.
Teams and agents
An agent is a person who answers messages. A team is a named group of agents you can hand a conversation to — Sales, Reception, Deliveries. Teams exist so a question can have an owner before it has a named person. Three kinds of membership are easy to confuse, and they do different jobs: | | What it decides | |---|---| | Role | what a person may do anywhere in the account | | Inbox membership | which conversations they can see at all | | Team membership | which group's queue they appear in, and who can be handed work | Only inbox membership grants access. A team gives nobody anything they did not already have. When to use a team When the right answer depends on a function rather than a person: a delivery complaint belongs to whoever is handling deliveries today, not to the agent who happened to read it. A team also keeps a conversation owned while nobody is at their desk, and keeps the queue visible. When not to use a team Do not use a team as a label for the kind of question. A conversation carries only one team, so one that is both a delivery problem and a refund request has to pick. Use labels for that, and the team for who acts. And do not use a team to control access — use inbox membership and roles. What you need first An administrator account, and the agents already added. See Invite your team. Steps 1. Go to Settings → Teams and create a team. Give it a name and a short description. 2. Decide whether to tick Allow auto assign for this team. This matters most; see below. 3. Add members. 4. Add those same people as collaborators on the inboxes they work in. Team membership does not do this for you. What assigning a team actually does This is the part that surprises people. When you set a team on a conversation: 1. If the current assignee is not a member of that team, the assignee is cleared. The conversation has changed hands, so the old owner stops being the owner. 2. If the team allows auto-assignment, one member is then picked — but only from people who are both members of that team and collaborators on that inbox, and currently online. 3. If the team does not allow auto-assignment, or nobody qualifies, the conversation sits unassigned inside the team until someone takes it. Removing a team from a conversation does not clear the assignee. A team member who was never added to the inbox is invisible to all of this. They cannot be picked automatically or chosen by hand: the assignee list is the inbox's collaborators plus the account's administrators. Where teams show up elsewhere - In the sidebar, under Conversations, you see only the teams you are a member of, each with its unread count. - Automation rules can read the team as a condition, and can assign a team, remove the assigned team, or email a team about a new conversation. A macro can assign a team. - Reports include a per-team view. A worked example A furniture retailer in Jeddah creates two teams: sales and deliveries. Sales allows auto-assignment — its three staff are interchangeable and all three are collaborators on the WhatsApp inbox. Deliveries does not, because one coordinator owns each case and picks work up deliberately. An agent reads a message about a damaged table and assigns deliveries. Her own assignment is cleared, and because the team does not auto-assign, the conversation waits in the deliveries queue until the coordinator takes it. Who can do this Administrators create, edit and delete teams and manage their membership; the Teams settings page is administrator-only. Any agent can assign a team to a conversation they can already see. Limits - A conversation can have one team. There is no secondary or watching team. - Team names are stored in lower case and must be unique in the account. "Sales" is saved as "sales". - Team membership grants no access. An agent still sees nothing from an inbox they are not a collaborator on. - Auto-assignment within a team still requires a member to be online. A team of offline people behaves like a team with auto-assignment switched off. - Deleting a team does not delete its conversations. They are left with no team and keep their assignee. - There is no team-level business-hours or escalation behaviour. A conversation left in a team queue stays there until someone moves it. Related - Invite your team - Roles and permissions - Assign and prioritise - Set up an inbox - Automation rules If it does not work I assigned a team and the conversation vanished from my own list. Expected. You are not in that team, so your assignment was cleared. Assign yourself again after the team if you want to keep it. The team allows auto-assignment but nobody is being picked. Check that at least one member is a collaborator on that inbox, and that at least one of those is online. I cannot find a colleague in the assignee list. They are not a collaborator on that inbox. Being in the team is not enough. A colleague cannot see the team in their sidebar. The sidebar lists only your own teams. Add them to it.
Roles and permissions
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 1. Go to Settings → Custom Roles and add a role. Give it a name and a description. 2. Tick the permissions it should carry, picking one conversation permission. Save. 3. Go to Settings → Agents, open the person, and choose the custom role in place of administrator or agent. 4. 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 - Invite your team - Teams and agents - Set up an inbox - Documentation and support 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.
Documentation and support
This documentation belongs to Lynomia Chat. The platform writes it, keeps it current and publishes it for every workspace at once, in English and Arabic. Your account reads it; it does not write it. That is deliberate. One documentation set means one answer to every question, the same answer for everyone, updated the day the product changes. Your workspace does not publish a help centre Lynomia Chat does not give a workspace its own public help centre to author. There is no Help Center section in the sidebar, no portal to create, no categories or articles of your own, and no public site under your own domain. The same is true through the API: the portal, category and article endpoints refuse a workspace request. If your workspace published one before this change, nothing of yours was deleted and the pages your customers already have links to are still online. What you can no longer do is edit them, add to them or take them down from here. Ask whoever administers your installation if you need a page changed or removed. What to do instead | You want to | Do this | |---|---| | Answer the same question again and again | Write a canned response and insert it in one keystroke | | Hand a customer something to read | Link to a page on your own website, or paste the answer | | Tell your own team how you work | Use a macro for the steps, and your own internal wiki for the prose | | Automate the answer entirely | Build an automation rule or a flow | A canned response is the closest thing to a help centre article for day-to-day work: it is written once, searched from the reply box with /, and it carries variables so the customer's name and order number fill themselves in. Where to find help | | Where | |---|---| | Documentation | the pages you are reading. Help & Support → Documentation in the sidebar, or /docs | | Changelog | what changed in each release, at /changelog | | Support | Help & Support → Contact Support in the sidebar | Both open in a new tab, and both are configured by whoever runs your installation, so a self-hosted install points at its own addresses. A note on roles A custom role no longer offers a Manage knowledge base permission, because there is no workspace knowledge base to manage. A role created before this change keeps the permission on its record, where it now grants nothing — you can leave it or edit the role to drop it, and either way it changes nothing about what that person can do. See Roles and permissions. Related - Canned responses - Macros - Roles and permissions If it does not work The Documentation or Contact support link is missing. The installation has not configured an address for it. Ask whoever administers your installation. I want to edit an article my workspace published before. You cannot, from here. The page itself is still online for your customers, but editing, adding and removing are administrator work on the installation now.