Skip to main content
The Inbox is where every customer reply lands — texts back from a campaign, emails, and messages from the chat widget on your website — all in one thread per customer. This guide is for anyone who answers customers: an owner, an office manager, or a CSR working the queue. You’ll use it every day. A conversation shows up in the Inbox as soon as a customer replies, or as soon as someone on your team sends them a message from here.

​
Step 1: Open the Inbox and find the message

  1. Click Inbox in the left navigation.
  2. Use the subnav to narrow what you’re looking at. It opens with an Actions group holding two entries, each with a live count:
    • Assigned to Me — the ones that are yours to answer
    • Conversations — everything you have access to Below the report groups, a Saved Views group holds every view you or your team has saved.
  3. The conversation list sits on the left, headed with the number in it — “48 conversations” — and “6 unread” underneath. Unread conversations have a blue dot and a bold name.
  4. Switch between Open, Closed and All with the three-way switch at the far left of the filter row. Each option carries its own live count, and the Inbox opens on Open.
  5. Narrow further with the filter bar beside the switch. Location and Assigned to sit on the bar; the +N pill at the end opens a panel holding the rest, with a Find a filter box at the top:
    • Location — starts on All Locations
    • Assigned to — Assigned to me, Unassigned, or a teammate by name; starts on Anyone
    • Source — SMS or Email
    • Campaign and Campaign type
    • City
    • Location Status — Active locations (the default), Inactive locations, or All locations. Conversations belonging to a location Liftify has made inactive are hidden until you widen this
    • Read Status — Unread, Read, or All (the default)
    • Last message — a date range, for finding the threads nobody has touched in a fortnight
    • your own custom contact fields, each as its own filter, grouped under Customer attributes. See Filter on your own custom fields
    • the search button, which searches by “Search by name, phone, email…”
  6. Click a conversation to open the thread on the right.
The open/closed switch is not counted as a filter, so the clear filters X beside the filter bar stays hidden on a plain Open inbox and only appears once you have actually narrowed something.
The subnav used to carry four entries — All Messages, Assigned to me, Email and SMS. The last two are gone and All Messages is now Conversations. Email and SMS are the Source filter now.The Inbox has moved onto the same filter bar the rest of Liftify uses, so the pills behave as they do on Reviews and Tasks. Account Owner is now called Assigned to, and Source, Campaign type, City and Last message are new.Read Status is new. Read state is shared across your whole account, not per person: a conversation is unread until somebody opens it, and once anyone does, it reads as read for everyone.
Landed on a filter combination you use constantly? Click the bookmark button at the end of the filter row — Save view — and it becomes its own entry in the subnav, with a live count. See Save an Inbox filter as a view.
Each row in the list shows the customer’s name, the account and location underneath, a two-line preview of the latest message, an Open or Closed pill, the channel icon, and how long ago it arrived (“5m”, “3hr”, “1d”). A customer sitting on your website in the chat widget right now shows a green Online pill.

​
Step 2: Read the thread

The thread pane shows the full back-and-forth with that customer across every channel. Under each message you’ll see how it was sent and what happened to it — for example “SMS · Delivered Oct 1 at 3:43 PM”. A message that didn’t make it shows a red icon; hover it to see the reason. If the conversation came out of a campaign, the campaign’s name appears above the thread so you know what the customer is responding to. A panel beside the thread holds the customer’s Contact Info, their reviews, their tasks, recent activity, and an Internal Notes section carrying your team’s notes on this conversation. It now starts closed, so the conversation itself gets the room; open it with the toggle in the thread header. Whether you leave it open or closed sticks in that browser, so your own choice wins from then on. On a narrow browser window the panel doesn’t appear at all — widen the window. Team-only notes are interleaved into the thread as full-width cards, each headed with a padlock and Internal note. They were never sent to the customer — see Add an internal note to a conversation.

​
Messages from before you moved to Liftify

If your account’s older conversations were brought across from the system you used before Liftify, they sit above the live thread in a block headed Earlier messages, collapsed, with Show 12 messages beside it (Hide closes it again). Inside, the history reads like the thread below it — the customer’s messages on the left, yours on the right, a date divider between days, and each one labelled SMS, Email, Web chat, Voicemail or Missed-call text. Replies your old system sent automatically are labelled Automated reply.
Archived messages are a record, not a conversation: the block is read-only. Reply in the live thread underneath as normal — the customer sees that as a new message, not a continuation of the old one.
A customer whose history came across but who has not written to you since shows up in the conversation list with Archived messages as their preview line and the date of their last message in the old system. Open it and you get the Earlier messages block with nothing below it yet. The same history is on the contact’s own page, under an Archived messages tab carrying the number of messages in it.

​
Step 3: Reply

The reply box sits at the bottom of the thread. It starts a single line tall and grows as you type, up to eight lines, then scrolls inside itself — so the toolbar and Send stay put however long the message runs.
Above the box is a Reply / Note toggle. Reply goes to the customer; Note writes a team-only note that is never sent to them. Check which one is selected before you send. See Add an internal note to a conversation.
  1. Pick the channel. The dropdown on the left of the reply box shows what you’re about to send: SMS, Email, or Web Chat. Liftify preselects the sensible one based on how the customer last reached you. The menu opens upwards, above the box.
  2. For email, check the Subject and the From name, which now sit beside the channel dropdown rather than on rows of their own. Both are editable on every reply, not just the first one in a conversation:
    • Subject is pre-filled with Re: the conversation’s most recent email subject — whichever direction it came from — up to 200 characters. Type over it and that is exactly what the customer sees. Clear it and Liftify falls back to the suggestion rather than sending a blank subject.
    • From is the name the reply appears from, pre-filled with your own profile name and capped at 100 characters. Change it to your company name, or the name of whoever the customer has been dealing with. The sending address itself does not change. It is never sticky: the next reply starts from your profile name again.
  3. Write your message. The box takes basic formatting for email. Three shortcuts sit in the toolbar:
    • the merge tag button — Insert Merge Tag, with a search box, for dropping in values like the customer’s first name
    • Templates — pick a saved response instead of typing the same thing again
    • the smiley button — Insert emoji, which opens a searchable picker and drops the emoji in at your cursor
  4. Watch the character counter under the box. The limits are 1,000 characters for a text, 1,600 for web chat, and 10,000 for email. The counter turns red if you go over.
  5. Click Send, or press Cmd+Enter (Ctrl+Enter on Windows). The button reads Sending… while it goes, and you’ll get a “Message sent successfully” confirmation.
Putting an emoji in a text halves the limit to 500 characters. An information icon appears beside the counter explaining why: “Emojis reduce the SMS character limit to 500 (70 characters per segment)”. Phone networks encode a message containing an emoji differently, and fit far less into each segment. Emails and web chat are unaffected.
The subject used to lock after the first email, with a padlock explaining that replies keep the original subject. That restriction is gone. Bear in mind what it was protecting: most email programs group messages by subject, so changing it mid-conversation may split the thread in your customer’s inbox. Every email in the Liftify thread now shows the subject it actually went out with as a strip across the top of its bubble, in both directions, so you can see when that has happened.
An option in the channel dropdown that can’t be used right now tells you why in the label itself — for example SMS (No phone number on file), Email (Unsubscribed), SMS (Verification required), or Web Chat (visitor offline).
Replying doesn’t assign the conversation to you. If your team works from assignments, assign it as well — see the next step.

​
Step 4: Assign the conversation

Assignment is how you hand a conversation to the right person and how your team avoids two people answering the same customer.
  1. In the thread header, click the assignment button — it reads Unassigned, or the current owner’s name.
  2. Pick a teammate from the list, or choose Unassigned to put it back in the pool. A checkmark shows the current selection.
  3. The change saves immediately and the conversation moves in everyone’s list right away.
If the dropdown says No team members available, nobody else on the account currently has permission to respond to conversations. The customer details panel shows the same thing under Assigned To, or No one assigned.
Depending on your role, you may only see conversations that are assigned to you. If a teammate mentions a conversation you can’t find, ask whoever administers your account whether your role includes viewing all conversations.

​
Step 5: Close it, reopen it, or come back to it later

Every conversation action lives in one menu, reachable two ways: right-click any row in the conversation list, or click the ⋮ (Actions) button in the thread header.
  • Close conversation — you’re done. It leaves the open queue and its pill flips to Closed.
  • Reopen conversation — shown instead when the conversation is already closed.
  • Mark as unread — on a conversation that has been read. Leaves it open and puts the blue unread dot back, so it stays on your radar for later.
  • Mark as read — shown instead on one that is still unread. Clears the blue dot without opening the thread, which is how you clear a row you have looked at in the list and decided needs nothing. Before this you had to open the conversation to get the dot off it.
A closed conversation reopens by itself the moment the customer sends something new, so closing is safe — you won’t miss a follow-up. If someone else closes or reopens a conversation while you have it open, your screen updates on its own.

​
Clear a whole view at once

When the queue has got away from you, you no longer have to work through it one row at a time. Click the ⋮ button beside the “48 total conversations · 6 unread” line at the top of the conversation list — its label is Bulk actions — and choose one of:
  • Mark all as read
  • Mark all as unread
  • Mark all as closed
These apply to every conversation matching the filters currently on screen, not to rows you have selected — there are no checkboxes. Set your filters first and check the total in that same line, because that total is what you are about to act on.
Mark all as closed is the only one that asks first. The window is headed Close all conversations? and reads “This will close all [number] open conversations in this view. Conversations can be individually reopened but this cannot be undone in bulk.” Click Close All to go ahead, or Cancel. Read and unread apply straight away and confirm with a count — “24 conversations marked as read.” Closing a large view runs in the background: you get “Closing 24 conversations. The list will update as it progresses.”, the list updates as it works, and you are told when it finishes. If some rows could not be updated, the message says how many. The menu is greyed out on an empty view, and Mark all as closed is greyed out when nothing in the view is open. If you do not have permission to change conversations, the menu does not appear at all.

​
Step 6: Unsubscribe a contact who asks to stop

When a customer says “stop emailing me” or “take me off your list”, record it in Liftify. This is a compliance action, so do it rather than just remembering.
  1. Open the actions menu (right-click the row, or the ⋮ button in the thread header).
  2. Click Unsubscribe contact, shown in red.
  3. The Unsubscribe Contact window explains the choice: “Choose which messages [contact name] should stop receiving. You can re-subscribe them later if needed.”
  4. Pick the scope:
    • Unsubscribe from ALL future communication — “This will unsubscribe from all categories below.” Use this when the customer wants out entirely.
    • Or, under “or select specific categories”, tick only what they asked to stop:
      • Feedback/Informational — “Review requests and informational content”
      • Marketing — “Promotional campaigns and offers”
      • Transactional — “Updates on transactions and confirmations”
  5. Click Unsubscribe. (The button stays greyed out until you’ve ticked at least one box.)
Liftify confirms with “Contact has been unsubscribed from all future messages.” — or names the specific categories — and posts a note into the thread itself recording who did it, so there’s a permanent record. Once a contact is fully unsubscribed, the reply box is replaced by a notice reading Contact Unsubscribed — “This contact has unsubscribed and can no longer be messaged.” — and an Unsubscribed badge appears in the thread header. The Unsubscribe contact option disappears from the menu.

​
Changing a contact’s preferences later

To re-subscribe someone, or to adjust their categories, open the contact’s record, click its actions menu, and choose Manage Unsubscribe Preferences. The checkboxes there work the opposite way from the Inbox window: a ticked box means the contact still receives that category. Untick a category to stop it, or tick Unsubscribe from all to stop everything. Click Save Preferences when you’re done. Unsubscribe from all and the category boxes now move together. Ticking it clears and greys out every category; unticking it ticks them all back on; and unticking the last remaining category ticks it for you. Whatever you see on screen is what gets saved. When you save, Liftify names what actually changed — “Resubscribed to Marketing”, “Unsubscribed from Feedback/Informational” — and the status badge at the top of the contact updates on the spot. If nothing changed you get “No changes to apply.” rather than a success message, and if the save fails you get “Unsubscribe preferences could not be saved. Please try again.” with the window still open so you don’t lose your work.
Re-subscribing someone brings back email only. Their consent to receive text messages is not restored, because Liftify can’t tell an operator’s mistake from a customer who replied STOP. If the customer wants texts again, they have to opt back in from their own phone.

​
Step 7: Start a conversation from scratch

You don’t have to wait for a customer to write first.
  1. Click New Message at the top of the conversation list.
  2. Search for the contact by name in the New Message window. If they aren’t in Liftify yet, click New Contact to add them.
  3. Pick the contact, choose the location if you’re asked, and click Next. The thread opens and you can reply as usual.

​
The automatic reply to inbound texts

When a customer texts you, Liftify sends one automatic reply back so they know the message landed. This is on for every account, and the text is usually yours to change.

​
It goes out once per exchange

The automatic reply acknowledges the start of a conversation, not every text in it. Once it has gone out to someone, Liftify holds it back for 24 hours, and the 24 hours restart every time they text again — so a customer firing off four texts in a row gets one reply, and somebody still texting the next morning is not acknowledged a second time mid-conversation. They have to go quiet for a full day before another one can be sent. A reply from your team ends it sooner: once anyone on your side has texted that customer back from the Inbox, the automatic reply is held for 24 hours whether the customer has gone quiet or not. A human is clearly on it, so there is nothing to acknowledge. Replying by email or web chat does not count — only a text.
This used to fire on every single inbound text, so a customer sending three messages in a row got three identical acknowledgements. If your customers have complained about that, it is fixed.

​
Change the wording, or turn it off

In the left sidebar, click the circle with your initials, then Settings, then Inbox under Applications, then the Auto-Responder tab. It holds one card, SMS Auto-Responder — “The automatic reply sent back to inbound text messages.”
  • Auto-Reply Message — what gets sent. If you have never changed it, the box shows Liftify’s default wording as real text, with the note “This is the default message. Edit it to use your own wording.” Saving it unchanged leaves you on the default; edit it and you have your own. Some accounts can’t edit this box at all — see below for why.
  • Send the automatic reply to inbound texts — “On by default. Turn this off to stop the automatic reply. Inbound texts still appear in the Inbox either way.”
Click Save Changes.
This setting used to sit on the AI Prompts page, which was a confusing home for it — it is a messaging setting, not an AI one. It now has its own Auto-Responder tab, and the AI Prompts tab beside it keeps only the response prompt and the suggestions toggle. The box also used to look empty when you were on the default, which read as “sends nothing”; it now shows the wording that actually goes out.
Switching the automatic reply off changes nothing about the Inbox itself: the customer’s text still arrives as a conversation and still waits for a human. All you are turning off is the immediate acknowledgement they get back.

​
Your own wording needs your own number

Whether you can change the wording at all depends on the numbers your texts go out from. A text sent to a number Liftify shares between businesses always gets the standard message, because there is no way to tell whose customer is texting in before the reply goes back. So the Auto-Reply Message box behaves in three ways:
  • Every location texts from a number of your own. You can edit the message freely.
  • Some do, some don’t. You can still edit it, and a note under the box says where your version lands: “Your wording only applies to texts sent to your dedicated numbers. Texts to shared numbers get the standard message.”
  • None do. The box shows the standard message and you cannot type in it. The note reads “Your texts go out from a shared number, so replies use this standard message. Custom wording needs a dedicated number.”
The box used to accept your wording in all three cases, and then quietly send the standard message anyway if you had no number of your own. If you wrote an auto-reply a while back and customers never saw it, that is why. A dedicated number is something Liftify sets up for you — contact support if you want one.
Send the automatic reply to inbound texts is unaffected by any of this. Turning it off stops the reply whichever number the text came in on. You need permission to edit AI settings to see the Auto-Responder and AI Prompts tabs. Someone who can only manage assignment rules opens the same page on Rules and sees no other tabs.

​
Troubleshooting

I can’t find a conversation a teammate mentioned. Two likely causes. First, check the open/closed switch at the left of the filter row — closed conversations are hidden unless you switch to Closed or All. Second, your role may limit you to conversations assigned to you; ask your account administrator about permission to view all conversations. The reply box is missing entirely. Your role doesn’t include permission to respond to conversations. You can read threads, but not send. “No Contact Method Available” — “Add a phone number or email address to this contact before sending a reply.” The contact record has neither. Add one on the contact, then come back. “SMS Inbox Sending Unavailable” — “In order to reply to text messages, your account needs additional verification. Contact support to get started.” US carriers require registration before a business can send texts. Use the Contact Support button in that notice; in the meantime you can still reply by email if the contact has an address. “Cannot send SMS because this contact’s phone number is invalid.” The number on the contact record isn’t a valid mobile number. Fix it on the contact and try again. “Message not sent: the merge tags used have no value for this contact, so the message would be empty.” Every merge field you used is blank for this customer, so the message would have gone out empty. Type the message out, or use a merge field the contact actually has a value for. “Message is too long (maximum 1000 characters).” The text limit came down from 1,600. Trim the text, or switch the channel to Email, which allows 10,000. The counter says 500 and I have not typed that much. There is an emoji in the message. Remove it and the limit goes back to 1,000. “Message not sent: it exceeds the 1600-character SMS limit.” Your text was inside the limit as you typed it, but grew past what the phone network accepts once Liftify filled in the merge tags — or the emojis in it take up more room than they look. Shorten it and send again. “This conversation has already been closed.” / “This conversation has already been reopened.” Someone else got there first — usually a teammate working the same queue. Refresh and check the current status. “This contact is already unsubscribed.” Another user unsubscribed them between the moment you opened the menu and the moment you submitted. A message shows as failed. Hover the red icon on the message for the carrier’s reason. The most common causes are a disconnected number, a customer who has replied STOP to your texts, or an email address that bounces. New replies aren’t appearing until I refresh. Live updating of the Inbox is now on for every account, so this should not happen. Reload once; if new messages still only show up on a refresh, it’s a connection problem between your browser and Liftify rather than a setting. Try a different network, then contact support.