Set up Customer Rooms
One-time account setup: create the Customer Rooms inbox, set the business name, support-team label and brand colour, and give the right people access.
Before you start
- Customer Rooms must be enabled for your account. It is in controlled rollout, so Boni switches it on once the fit is agreed. If the Customer Rooms option is not offered when adding an inbox, it is not enabled yet.
- You need an Administrator role. Agents cannot create the inbox.
- Decide the customer-facing wording first. What the customer reads is the business name and support-team label you enter here, not your internal inbox name.
Create the Customer Rooms inbox
- Open Settings -> Inboxes -> Add Inbox.
- Choose Customer Rooms.
- Fill in the four fields below.
- Continue to the normal agent assignment step and select the team that should work rooms.
| Field | Who sees it | Choose |
|---|---|---|
| Business name | The customer | Your trading name, exactly as customers know it |
| Inbox name | Your team | How the inbox appears in Bow Chat, for example "Service rooms" |
| Support-team label | The customer | The team the customer thinks they are talking to, for example "Service team" |
| Primary brand colour | The customer | Your brand colour; it sets the room's accent |
Bow Chat creates the inbox and its room configuration together. If any field fails validation, nothing is half-created — the whole step rolls back and you can try again.
One Customer Rooms inbox per account is the supported shape. Do not convert an existing WhatsApp, voice, or bot inbox into a rooms inbox; create the dedicated one.
Decide who can work rooms
Access is governed by the inbox, not by a visibility toggle:
- Administrators can see the Customer Rooms workspace for the account.
- Agents can see it only when they are members of the Customer Rooms inbox.
- Anyone you later assign as a room owner or room member must already have access to that inbox, otherwise the assignment is rejected.
Add people to the inbox first, then build rooms.
Configure the room profile fields
Rooms are not fixed to one industry. The fields on a room are yours to define — vehicle and job number for a service business, project and phase for an agency, policy and claim for an insurer, order and shipment for a distributor.
For each field, decide two things:
- Is it needed? Keep the set small. Every field is something a staff member has to keep accurate.
- Is it customer-visible? Only fields you explicitly mark visible appear in the customer's room.
Anything you have not configured is not shown to the customer, even if a value exists somewhere.
Optional: room app artwork
Customers can install the room as an app. You can supply your own icons and a notification badge so the installed app carries your brand; otherwise it falls back to Bow Chat artwork.
Configure the artwork before you invite customers at scale. An existing install can keep older icon and name metadata until the customer reopens or reinstalls the app, so late artwork changes reach earlier customers slowly. Do not tell a customer their app is branded until the artwork is configured and you have opened a room to confirm it.
Confirm the setup works
- Create one internal test room from a conversation in the new inbox.
- Assign an owner and add one or two members.
- Create an access link and open it yourself on a phone.
- Check the business name, support-team label, and colour read correctly.
- Send a message from Bow Chat and confirm it appears in the room; reply from the room and confirm it lands back in the inbox.
Do this once before the first real customer. It takes a few minutes and catches wording and branding mistakes while they are still cheap.