Let a team share one WhatsApp number

A three-stylist salon runs its bookings off one WhatsApp number on the receptionist's personal phone. When she's on lunch, nobody else can reply, and twice a month two different staff have replied to the same customer with conflicting information because neither saw what the other already sent.

The shared team inbox puts every incoming chat in one place that any assigned staff member can see and answer from their own login. A manager assigns conversations to a specific stylist or the front desk, internal notes flag context the customer never sees, and a status — open, pending, resolved — keeps the queue from becoming a scroll of unanswered chats nobody owns.

The core risk this capability exists to prevent is two agents replying to the same open conversation at the same time. Without an assignment lock, a stylist and the front desk can both see an unassigned enquiry and both answer it within a minute of each other, and the customer receives two different, possibly contradictory messages from what looks like one business. Assignment is what prevents this — once a conversation is claimed, it shows as owned, and the system should make that visible enough that a second agent doesn't reply on top of it.

Internal notes carry their own operational risk: they exist specifically to hold context the customer should never see — a complaint history, a pricing exception, a personal preference — and the interface has to make the boundary between an internal note and a customer-facing reply unmistakable. A note that gets sent to the customer by mistake, especially one recording something unflattering about them, is a trust problem no apology fully undoes.

Access itself needs scoping. A three-location salon chain sharing one workspace should not have a stylist at one branch reading conversations that belong to another branch's customers by default — agent access is scoped to the numbers and teams they're assigned to, which matters more as a business adds locations or brings on staff who shouldn't see every customer's history. This scoping is what keeps a shared inbox from becoming a shared liability as the team grows.