A customer has to reach you somehow. Gruvi gives you four ways, and whichever they pick, the conversation arrives in the same place.
What a channel is
A channel is a route into your inbox. Turning one on creates an address, a number or a widget that customers can use, and points it at Gruvi.
You do not need all four. Most teams start with one and add others when customers ask for them.
The four channels
- Live Chat
- A chat window that sits in the corner of your website. Customers click it and start typing. The fastest of the four, and the one customers expect an immediate answer on.
- An address customers write to, either your own support address or one we provide. Slower, longer, and the one people use when they have something complicated to explain.
- A WhatsApp Business number customers can message. Familiar and informal, and often the only thing customers in some countries will use.
- Telegram
- A Telegram bot customers can message. The quickest of the four to set up, and useful for technical audiences who already live in Telegram.
What stays the same whichever channel they use
This is the part that matters most, and it is often missed. Everything you have learned about working a conversation applies identically on all four.
- Messages become threads in the same shared inbox.
- You assign, label, prioritise and resolve them the same way.
- Chloe can read and answer on any of them.
- Your reply goes back on the channel the customer used. You never choose it, and you never have to think about it.
So adding a channel does not add a new way of working. It adds a new front door to the same room.
What changes with the channel
Four things genuinely differ:
- How fast people expect an answer.
- Minutes on live chat, hours on email. The same delay reads as normal on one and neglectful on the other.
- Cc and Bcc.
- Only email has them, because only email has the idea of copying somebody in.
- What you have to set up.
- Live chat needs a snippet on your website, email needs forwarding and a DNS record, WhatsApp needs a Meta business account, Telegram needs a bot. They are not equally quick.
- Whether Chloe answers.
- Each channel has its own Chloe replies here switch, so you can let her handle live chat while keeping email human-only.
Which one to start with
If you already have a support email address, start there. It is where your customers are already writing, and pointing it at Gruvi changes nothing for them.
If you do not, start with live chat. It takes a minute, it needs nothing from anybody else, and it is the one that changes how your website feels most.
Where channels are set up
- 1Click Settings at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar.
- 2In the Settings sidebar, open Channels.
- 3Pick Live Chat, Email, WhatsApp or Telegram.
- 4Each one tells you what connecting involves before you commit to anything.
Once a channel is live you can see which one a conversation came in on. There is a small badge on the customer's avatar in the thread list, a Channel row in the thread details panel, and a Channel filter under the funnel. ---