Overview
A participant (or collaborator) is an agent who follows a conversation and receives its notifications, without being its assignee. This is different from assignment: the assignee is a single person who owns the conversation; participants are extra teammates who join in to collaborate — to ask for help, supervise, or prepare a handoff — while ownership of the conversation stays with the assignee.
A conversation can have several participants at once, and adding or removing someone does not change who the assignee is.
Prerequisites
- An agent or administrator profile.
- An open conversation in an inbox you have access to.
- The teammates you want to add must have access to the same inbox/account to appear in the list.
Step by step
- Open the conversation and find the context panel (right-hand column).
- Locate the Participants (Conversation participants) section.
- To add, click add participant and pick one or more agents from the list. They start following the conversation immediately.
- To remove, open the participants list and remove the agent — they stop receiving notifications for that conversation.
- Changes take effect right away, without changing the assignee or the conversation status.
Settings & options
- Notifications without being the assignee: participants receive the conversation's notifications (new messages and updates) without being assigned to it.
- Relationship with mentions (@): when you mention a teammate with @ in a private note, they are automatically added as a participant — the mention is the natural shortcut to pull someone into the conversation.
- Multiple participants: the list accepts as many teammates as needed; each one joins and leaves independently.
Use cases
- Ask a specialist for help: add (or mention) the person who knows the topic to assist without taking over the conversation.
- Supervisor following along: a lead joins as a participant to watch the handling without removing it from the current assignee.
- Collaborative handoff: before passing the conversation on, keep the agent who will take over as a participant so they follow the context from the start.
Tips, limits & best practices
- Participant ≠ assignment: adding someone as a participant does not make them the assignee — use assignment for that.
- Keep the list lean: every participant gets notifications, so too many people clutters everyone's notifications. Add only those who really need to follow, and remove them when no longer needed.
- Use mentions in notes to bring someone in quickly — it already adds them as a participant and records the request in the history.
Troubleshooting
- A teammate didn't get a notification: confirm they were actually added as a participant (and not just mentioned in a reply to the customer) and that they have access to the inbox of that conversation. Also check the teammate's own notification preferences.
- The agent doesn't appear in the list to add: they probably don't have access to the inbox — ask an administrator to add them to the inbox/team.