This guide takes you through one complete reply, start to finish. It assumes you have never opened Gruvi before. Give it about ten minutes.

What you are about to do

Answering a customer in Gruvi has four parts, and they are always the same:

Open the conversation and read it.
Make it clear that you are the one dealing with it.
Write and send your answer.
Record where the conversation has got to, so nobody repeats your work.

Three words show up throughout. Here is what they mean:

Thread: One conversation with one customer, holding all the messages in it.
Assignee: The person responsible for a thread. A thread with no assignee is Unassigned.
Status: Where a conversation has got to: Open, Pending, Resolved, Closed or Spam.

Step 1: open the conversation

1In the left-hand sidebar, click Inbox.
2Look at the cards in the left column. Each card is one conversation.
3Click a card. If this is your first day, click the thread from the Gruvi team. It is a safe place to practise.
4The messages appear in the middle column, oldest at the top.
5Read the whole thread before you do anything else, including any earlier replies from colleagues.

Step 2: read the context panel

The column on the right tells you who you are talking to and what has happened so far. It saves you piecing the story together yourself. Glance at three things:

Customer sentiment: How the customer's mood has moved through the conversation, shown as a row of faces across time. A conversation that has turned negative needs a different tone from one that has not.
What's going on?: A short bulleted summary of the conversation: what the customer wants, what has been tried, and what was agreed. Useful when a thread is long, or when you are picking up someone else's work.
Feed: A running list of what has happened in the thread: messages sent, status changes, who did what and when.

Step 3: take responsibility for the thread

Assigning a thread to yourself tells the rest of your team "I have got this". It stops two people writing the same reply, and it puts the conversation into your My Threads tab so you can find it again.

1Look at the top of the middle column, above the messages.
2Click Unassigned.
3A panel opens with a Search members... box and a list of people.
4Find your own name, which has a You badge beside it, and click it.
5Your name and photo now replace the word Unassigned.

Do this before you start typing, not after. Assigning first is what stops the duplicate reply.

Step 4: write your reply

The box at the bottom of the middle column is the composer. It says Reply to customer... (/ for Chloe, # for replies and shortcuts).

Everything you type in this box goes to the customer. To write something only your colleagues can see, use a private note instead. There is more below.

1Click inside the composer box.
2Type your reply. Answer the question they actually asked, in the plainest words you can.
3To add a file, click the paperclip icon below the box.
4To add an emoji, click the smiley face icon.
5To send a recording rather than text, click the microphone icon.
6To dictate instead of typing, click the waveform icon. It transcribes your speech into the box as text, which you can then edit.

Getting help while you write

The wording in the composer, (/ for Chloe, # for replies and shortcuts), tells you about two keys that open menus. Both are covered in full in Slash commands and drafting replies with Chloe.

Type # at the start of the box and a menu appears with two sections.

The first is Agent actions, where you hand the work to Chloe, your AI assistant:

#chloe.reply: Chloe drafts a reply for you.
#chloe.summarize: Chloe writes a short summary of the whole thread. Useful on a long conversation you have just inherited.
#chloe.rewrite: Chloe rewrites the draft you have already typed, tidying it up while keeping your meaning.

Underneath sit your canned replies. These are answers your team has already written and agreed on, for questions you get over and over. If you have not written any yet, the menu tells you so and offers you a link to create your first.

Move through the menu with the ↑ and ↓ arrow keys, choose with Enter, and close it with Esc.

Type / at the start of the box to ask Chloe for help in your own words, rather than picking a set action.

Whatever Chloe produces is a draft, not a sent message. Read it, change anything that does not sound like you, then send it yourself.

Leaving a private note instead

A private note is a message you write inside the thread that the customer never sees. Your colleagues do. Use one to hand a conversation over, warn someone about a difficult customer, or ask a question before you answer.

1Click the pen icon below the composer box. The keyboard shortcut is Cmd+Shift+P on a Mac, or Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows.
2The whole box turns yellow, and a padlock appears with the words Only visible to your team. That colour is your safety check. Yellow means private, white means the customer will see it.
3The prompt changes to Add a team note... (@ to mention).
4Type your note.
5To pull a particular colleague in, type @ and start typing their name, then pick them from the list. Your note then shows up in their Mentions tab.
6Click the send button to post the note.
7Click the pen icon again to go back to replying to the customer. Check the box has turned white again before you type.

If you are ever unsure whether you are about to write to the customer or to your team, look at the colour of the box, not at what you remember clicking.

Step 5: send it

The blue arrow button to the right of the composer sends your message. The small arrow next to it opens a menu of send options, which save you a step.

1Read your reply once more.
2To send and nothing else, click the blue arrow button.
3To send and mark the conversation as sorted, click the small arrow beside it and choose Send & resolve.
4To send and finish the conversation entirely, choose Send & close.

Two settings live in that same menu, and it is worth knowing they are there:

Undo send: Holds your message for five seconds before it goes, so you can pull it back. Leave this on.
Enter sends message: Decides whether pressing Enter sends the reply or starts a new line. Turn it off if you often write long replies with paragraph breaks.

Step 6: say where the conversation has got to

If you did not use Send & resolve or Send & close, set the status by hand. This is how your colleagues know whether to pick the thread up.

1At the top of the middle column, click the status button, which will say Open.
2Choose the status that matches the truth: Resolved if you have answered it, Closed if the conversation is finished for good, or Mark as Spam if it is junk.
3The pill on the thread card in the left column updates to match, and the thread leaves your Inbox queue.

While you are up there, you can also set a Priority (Urgent, High, Normal or Low) and add Labels to describe what the conversation is about. Labels make it much easier to find similar threads later. The keyboard shortcut for labels is L.

What to do next

That is the whole job. Everything else in Gruvi makes this loop faster.

Learn the seven inbox tabs so you can find work without scrolling.
Turn on smart sorting so the conversations that need you rise to the top.
Meet Chloe, and let her draft the answers you write over and over.

Your first day: replying to a customer