How to set up a shared inbox for a sales team: channels, ownership, AI and human handover, blocking, and what to write down

1. Connect the channels

• WhatsApp on the Business Platform, through Meta's Embedded Signup — about ten minutes. A number still on the phone app has to leave it.
• Email from the mailbox you already use — Gmail or Zoho.
• Instagram DM and Messenger through your Facebook Page (from Pro). Both are reply-only: customers write first.
• Your website — a WhatsApp button or a form that posts enquiries into the inbox with the page and ad they came from.

2. Decide who owns a conversation

Every conversation needs one owner, or it has none. Decide the default — round the team, by product, by city, by language, by how hot the lead is — and write it as a rule rather than a habit. In Linkubit that is a workflow: "when a lead is qualified, assign to the sales team", "when the city is Mumbai, assign to Priya". The agent editor takes it in a sentence.

3. Decide when the AI answers and when a person does

• The AI answers first, in the first minute, at any hour — greeting, qualifying questions, catalogue answers.
• It hands over on the topics you name (refunds, complaints, custom quotes), when the customer asks for a person, and when it is not sure.
• A person can take over any conversation with one click, and the AI stays out of it until someone hands it back.
• A conversation that floods — dozens of messages in a few minutes — is handed to a person automatically.

The handover guide has the list of moments worth handing over on.

4. Give the person who takes over what they need

• The whole history on one thread, across channels, with voice notes transcribed and every product and payment request sent.
• A summary of the conversation so far, when the thread is long — choose how many messages it reads.
• The customer's record beside it: what they asked for, their stage, their deals, their score, and everything the product did about them.
• A composer that tells you before you send if the channel's window has closed, and what you can send instead.

5. Deal with spam and abuse

Block a contact and their messages stop reaching the inbox, the AI and every campaign — while the record of what they sent is kept. Delete a message from the thread when it should not be there; it shows as deleted, with who deleted it. Decide who on the team may do each, because both are permissions somebody grants.

6. Decide what gets written down

The four to six facts each customer must have before a quote is worth writing — budget, size, dates, product — are fields on the record, not lines in a chat. The AI fills them as it asks; a person fills them on the record when they take over. Scoring rules, routing and reports all read the fields, so a fact left in the chat is a fact nothing can act on. The qualifying guide has the questions by industry.

The checklist

1. Channels connected and a test message received on each.
2. A default owner rule, and a fallback for when nobody matches.
3. Handover topics written as rules, not as a paragraph in a prompt.
4. The team's roles set: who answers, who can block, who can export.
5. Qualifying fields defined, and the AI asking for them.
6. A test conversation run end to end: a question, a quote from the catalogue, a handover, a reply from a person.