Create and run a room
The daily staff workflow: create a room from a conversation, set the owner, members, stage and next action, track issues, and share access.
Where rooms live
Bow Chat shows a Customer Rooms workspace when the feature is on. It lists rooms with the customer, reference, accountable owner, number of people with access, open issues, and when the room was last updated. You can search by customer, reference, email, or phone, and filter by stage or by active and archived.
The room itself is edited from the conversation sidebar. Open the room, and the sidebar is the editor.
Create a room
- Open or start a conversation in the Customer Rooms inbox.
- In the conversation sidebar, create the room.
- Give it a title and a reference your team will actually search for — a job number, order number, project code, or policy number.
- Assign one accountable owner.
- Add room members if more than one person is genuinely involved.
If you create a room without naming members, everyone already on the conversation stays, and the owner is added. Membership is only replaced when you explicitly submit a new list, so a quick edit will not silently remove someone.
Owners and members must already have access to the Customer Rooms inbox. If an assignment is rejected, add the person to the inbox first.
Keep four things separate
| Concept | Means |
|---|---|
| Access team | Who is allowed to open this room at all |
| Owner | The one person accountable for the next customer action |
| Members | Staff with an active role in this relationship |
| Stage | Where the work has reached |
This separation is what keeps rooms quiet at scale. Alerting every involved person on every message across thousands of rooms recreates exactly the group noise you moved away from.
Set the stage and the next action
Two fields do most of the work for the customer:
- Stage answers "where is this?"
- Next action answers "what happens now, and who is waiting?"
Keep the next action written from the customer's point of view. "Customer review due tomorrow" is useful. "Follow up" is not.
The room list has awaiting-team and awaiting-customer counts. They are only trustworthy if staff keep the next action current, so make updating it part of closing any interaction — not a weekly clean-up.
Maintain the room profile
Fill only the fields your administrator configured. Remember which are customer-visible; a value entered in a visible field is published to the customer the moment it is saved.
Where another system owns the fact — a job card, billing system, order system, policy record — treat that system as authoritative. Show or link the value, and let a person confirm it before it becomes a customer-visible claim.
Track issues
When something goes wrong for the customer, raise it as an issue on the room. The customer can raise one too. Issues connect to the normal Boni ticket workflow, so the room shows open issue counts and the public state of each one without becoming a second, competing helpdesk.
Close the issue in the ticket workflow; the room reflects the resolved state.
Private notes and follow-ups
Private notes stay in Bow Chat. Nothing you write as a note reaches the room.
Human follow-ups created on the conversation synchronize to Boni Tasks, so a commitment made inside a room becomes real work with an owner and a due date rather than a promise buried in a thread.
Correcting a message
For a message your team sent into the room:
- Edit for everyone is available for a short window after sending, and needs replacement text.
- Delete for everyone removes the text and attachments from what the customer receives.
The customer sees Edited or Message deleted. Staff keep the record of who changed what and when. Customers can send new messages but cannot edit or delete anything.
Closing work without closing the relationship
A job, order, delivery, or support case can finish while the room stays. Archive a room only when the relationship itself has ended. The value of the room is that the customer can come back to it next time.