AI agent for client messages
A message arrives while you're busy, and two days later it isn't yours any more. An inbox agent holds the stream: it closes what is genuinely routine and moves everything else to a person quickly, with the context already gathered. The value isn't that a human was replaced — it's that nothing is lost and nothing sits unanswered for two days.
What an inbox agent does
- Pulls the stream together from the channels you open to it: DMs, comments, messengers, email.
- Answers what is genuinely routine: opening hours, prices from your own list, where to park, whether a document arrived.
- Moves everything else to a person straight away — with the thread and the context attached, not a one-line «take a look».
- Watches the clock: nothing sits longer than the response time you set.
- Flags a question the third time it appears, so you answer it once instead of every week.
Processes that run themselves
A playbook isn't a button — it's a process with a condition that starts it. These three get set up most often.
A message arrives out of hours
Someone writes after closing, overnight or at the weekend
- Confirm it arrived and say when a person will reply — without promising anything you didn't set
- Answer on the spot if the question is on your routine list
- Put everything else in the morning queue with its context
- Show the queue first thing when the working day starts
The same question for the third time
A similar question comes in for the third time in a week
- Put the three messages side by side and show what is actually being asked
- Propose the wording of an answer and where it should live
- Start using it only once you've approved it
A message has gone unanswered too long
There's been no reply past the time you set
- Check whether the client was already answered in another channel
- Remind whoever owes the reply, with what's already known attached
- Move it to the top of the queue and mark it overdue
- Tell you if there's still no reply after the reminder
Where the agent stops
- It answers only from what you gave it. If the answer isn't there, it says it doesn't know rather than inventing one.
- Anything needing professional judgement, and any complaint, goes to a person unanswered.
- It doesn't name deadlines, prices or outcomes it wasn't given — not even when the client pushes.
- It doesn't start conversations with people who never wrote to you: this is an inbox, not an outreach list.
FAQ
Will the client realise they're not talking to a person?
The reply comes from your account, in your tone and by your rules. In practice what annoys people isn't a fast reply — it's two days of silence. If you'd rather the agent introduced itself as one, that's a setting too.
What if it answers something stupid?
You define the list of things it answers itself, and it answers only from that list. Anything outside it goes to a person unanswered — silence is cheaper here than an invented reply. The boundary can change at any point, and the whole thread stays visible to you.
What happens to a complaint?
A complaint is never handled automatically. The agent flags it, gathers the history — what was bought, when they last wrote, how it ended — and hands it to a person without replying to the client itself.
Does this work if messages arrive in five different places?
That's exactly where it pays off most. Messages get lost not because there are many of them but because they sit in five windows and none of them counts as the main one. The agent puts them in one queue and watches the response time across all of them at once.
Where this shows up
Walkthroughs where the incoming stream is held by an agent.
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