Overview
These are the three foundations of your operation: the account (identity and general preferences), the agents (the people who handle conversations) and the teams (groups of agents that organize the queue and conversation assignment). Setting them up well from the start avoids rework as the team grows.
- The account defines company name, default language, time zone and branding.
- Agents are the users with access, each with a role (permissions).
- Teams group agents by function, product or shift and help route conversations.
Prerequisites
- The Administrator role to edit the account, invite agents and create teams.
- The email addresses of the people you'll invite.
- An idea of how you want to organize the team (by channel, product, shift, etc.).
- Optionally, a square PNG, JPEG, GIF, or WebP icon for each team. If you'd rather not use an image, a team can be identified by an emoji or a colored icon picked inside ConversaLabs, with nothing to upload.
Step by step
- Account: in Settings, open the account tab and adjust name, language and time zone.
- Agents: open the agents area and use the invite option. Enter the email and role; the person receives an email invitation to set a password.
- Teams: create a team, give it a clear name and choose its visual identity — upload an image or open the Icon and emoji picker (the smiley button next to the image buttons) and pick an emoji or a colored icon. Then decide whether it allows auto-assignment and add the member agents. With no image and no icon, ConversaLabs generates an icon from the team's initials.
- Connect teams to your inboxes and assignment rules as needed.
- Review the agent list and remove/deactivate anyone no longer on the team.
Settings & options
- Language and time zone: affect business hours, reports and automated messages.
- Agent role: defines permissions (see the roles and governance article).
- Availability: each agent can appear as online/busy/offline, influencing assignment.
- Team with auto-assignment: distributes new conversations among available members.
- Team icon: identifies the team in settings, the sidebar, assignment selectors, bulk actions, access scopes, integrations, and reports. You can upload, replace, or remove it at any time; removing it restores the generated initials.
- Emoji or colored icon: the Icon and emoji picker opens a panel with two tabs. Icons holds a curated set of 163 icons, a Search icons field that matches both the icon name and its keywords, a button that toggles between Outline icons and Filled icons, and a palette of 10 colors: Slate, Red, Orange, Amber, Green, Teal, Blue (the default), Indigo, Violet and Pink. Emojis has search by name plus a Frequently used section with the 16 most recently picked emojis, kept in your own browser. An emoji already carries its own color, so picking one clears the selected color — the color is only stored when the value is an icon. The panel's eraser button removes the icon and the color in one go.
- Icon takes precedence over the image: when a team has an emoji or icon, it is displayed instead
of the uploaded image — in the team list, the team selector in the conversation panel, the team
filter, when you mention the team with
@in the composer, and in macro and automation menus. The image is still stored; to show it again, remove the icon with the eraser button. - Auto-Resolve: resolves conversations with no activity after the configured time (minutes, hours or days), optionally sending a closing message and applying a label. By default, conversations awaiting an agent's reply are protected and never auto-resolved; the option "Also resolve conversations awaiting an agent's reply — not recommended" is an explicit opt-in to include them. See the dedicated Auto-Resolve article.
Use cases
- Separate Support, Sales and Billing into distinct teams.
- Route conversations from a specific WhatsApp number to the responsible team.
- Scale the team by adding agents to an existing team, without reconfiguring everything.
Tips, limits & best practices
- Use self-explanatory team names — they appear in filters and reports.
- Prefer a square image that stays clear at small sizes. Files may be up to 15 MB; PNG, JPEG, GIF, and WebP are supported.
- An emoji or colored icon is the quickest route when there's no logo ready: it stays sharp at any size and needs no upload.
- Use different colors for teams that usually appear side by side in the same list — the color is what tells two similar icons apart at a glance.
- Team names are normalized on save: control characters are stripped, surrounding whitespace is trimmed and the name is stored in lowercase — the capitalization you see in some lists is only presentation.
- Set the right role at invite time so you don't grant overly broad access.
- Deactivate agents who left instead of leaving them active and unused.
Troubleshooting
- The invitation didn't arrive: ask them to check spam and confirm the email; resend the invitation if needed.
- Conversations aren't being distributed: check that the team has auto-assignment on and that agents are available (online).
- The icon wasn't accepted: confirm the file format and 15 MB limit. If an image cannot load, the interface keeps the team initials visible so its identity is never lost.
- I uploaded an image but the team still shows the emoji: the emoji or icon takes precedence over the image. Open the Icon and emoji picker and use the eraser button to remove it — the image comes back.
- I picked an emoji and the color disappeared: that's expected. The color only applies to icons; an emoji already has colors of its own.
- I can't invite agents: the plan limit may have been reached or your role lacks permission — talk to the administrator.
Inboxes for team-scoped roles
A team-scoped role can navigate inboxes the user belongs to. Conversations remain restricted to that role’s teams and permissions. Seeing an inbox in navigation does not grant access to its settings. After switching accounts or starting impersonation, wait for the current user’s inboxes to load.