Customer Rooms
Give each customer one private branded room for messages, documents, status, and the next action, while your team keeps private notes and clear ownership in Bow Chat.
What a Customer Room is
A Customer Room is one private space shared by a customer and the team that serves them. The customer opens it from a link, sees your business name and colour, and finds their own messages, documents, current status, next action, and the person accountable for it. Nobody else's room is visible or reachable from it.
Your team works from Bow Chat. The room is a channel in the same shared inbox, so assignment, search, private notes, mentions, and follow-ups behave the way the rest of Bow Chat does.
A Customer Room is not a WhatsApp group, and it does not create one. It is your own surface, so its content does not depend on a messaging provider's group rules, retention, or member list.
What the customer sees
- One-to-one messages with your team.
- Photos and documents they sent or you shared.
- Only the profile fields you marked customer-visible, plus the current status and next action.
- The accountable owner and the team who can see the room.
- Any issue they raised and its public state.
- An option to install the room as an app on a phone or desktop, and to turn on notifications.
What stays private
Private notes, internal tasks, assignments, and anything you have not explicitly made customer-visible stay in Bow Chat. Making a field or a status visible is a deliberate choice, not a default.
Staff can correct a message they sent into the room. Editing is available for a short window after sending, and deleting for everyone removes the text and attachments from what the customer receives. The customer sees a small Edited or Message deleted label. Bow Chat keeps the staff-side record for audit; this is a correction tool, not a way to erase history.
What it is for
| Situation | Why a room fits |
|---|---|
| A service or repair job with approvals and documents | Status, estimate, and paperwork stay in one place instead of scrolling back through a chat |
| A project or onboarding that runs for weeks | The customer can return to the same room instead of asking for a status update |
| An account with several staff involved | One accountable owner is always named, while the rest of the team can still see and help |
| A relationship where staff change | The room and its history survive the handover |
What it is not
- Not a replacement for every channel. WhatsApp, email, and calls remain useful for first contact, short alerts, and escalation.
- Not a system of record for your operational data. A dealer system, job card, order system, billing system, or policy system stays authoritative for the facts it owns. The room shows, links to, or references those facts through a reviewed path; it does not silently change them.
- Not a claim about messaging cost. A room can reduce how much routine back-and-forth needs a paid message, but only when customers actually open and use it.
Availability
Customer Rooms is in controlled rollout. Boni enables it for an account after the product and commercial fit is agreed, and an account administrator then creates the Customer Rooms inbox from Bow Chat settings. One Customer Rooms inbox per account is the supported shape today.
Next
- Set up Customer Rooms — the one-time account setup.
- Create and run a room — the daily staff workflow.
- Customer access and recovery — how customers get in, install the room, and get back in.
- Notifications and escalation — what happens when an update goes unread.
- WhatsApp groups or Customer Rooms — how to decide.