ConnectBY JBRHHOW CONNECT WORKS
Connect is not a chatbot bolted to an inbox. It is an operating loop: identify who this is, load what you know about them, decide what is allowed, answer from approved knowledge, take the permitted action, and schedule what happens next. This page is that loop, step by step.
One inbound message, in order
Each step is an actual stage in the product. The documentation names the screen each one writes to.
THE OPERATING LOOP
This is one continuous process, not ten features. Each stage reads what the previous one wrote.
An inbound email, WhatsApp message or call, or an outbound conversation Connect itself started from prospect research. Every one enters the same pipeline.
Which of your businesses this is for, which mailbox or number it came to, and therefore which identity, tone, knowledge and rules apply. A workspace with several businesses does not share a single generic voice.
The sender is matched to an existing person and company rather than filed as a new contact. Their timeline, open quotes, past cases and agreed terms come with them.
Usually the channel they used. Where your rules prefer another — a call for anything above a value threshold, for example — that preference is applied deliberately.
The answer is built from the knowledge you approved, not from general internet plausibility. Where the knowledge is thin, that is visible as an escalation rather than as confident prose.
What they need, when, at what volume, who decides — captured as fields on the record, so the pipeline reflects reality rather than someone's memory of the call.
Sends the reply, books the follow-up, opens the case, moves the opportunity, drafts the quote — whichever of these your autonomy mode permits at this moment.
Outside the boundary, work stops and waits in Needs You with the draft, the context and the reason it stopped. An approval is a decision with a name attached.
Every open thread leaves with a dated next step and an owner. This is the single largest difference between Connect and an inbox.
Agreements, objections, preferences and problems are written back to the relationship as they happen — not summarised at the end of a quarter.
Nothing in this loop is reversible only by us. You can take over a thread, change the mode, revoke a permission or disconnect a mailbox at any point, and the history stays with you.
EMAIL · PHONE · WHATSAPP
The same rules, the same knowledge and the same record apply regardless of how the customer reached you.
Your real mailboxes, connected through the provider's own authorisation and routed by business identity.
A real-time voice layer for inbound and outbound calls, with the conversation written back to the same relationship.
Inbound messages and replies, on the number your business connects, under the same autonomy policy as everything else.
Which channels are live for you depends on the accounts and provider numbers connected during setup. SMS sending and call recording are carrier-dependent; they are confirmed in your pilot rather than assumed here.
YOUR CONTROL
The question is never whether the system is safe in general. It is what you have allowed it to do today.
Everything prepared, nothing sent. The honest way to start: you read a week of real replies before a single one leaves.
Routine work proceeds; anything consequential stops in Needs You with the context it needs to be judged in seconds.
It acts inside the boundary you drew, and escalates the moment a request reaches the edge of it.
Every action carries an audit record: what was done, under which rule, with what evidence, at what time. You can answer "why did it say that?" without asking us.
RELATIONSHIP MEMORY
A system that stores messages can search. A system that keeps the relationship can act.
What one customer record holds
WHAT IT IS NOT
Every one of these is a question people ask in the first meeting, so it may as well be answered before it.
It works the channels your customers already use — your mailbox, your phone line, your WhatsApp number — rather than asking them to come to a widget.
Connect joins the mailboxes you have. Your team keeps working in them, and any thread can be taken over by a person mid-conversation.
It knows what you approved. Thin knowledge produces thin answers, which is why the setup week is about loading what is true rather than about configuration screens.
The default is Review before send: every outbound message, on any channel, waits for a person's yes. Autonomy is something you grant, in steps, after you have read what it would have said.
QUESTIONS
No. Mailboxes are connected through the provider's own authorisation flow, which you grant and can revoke. There is no stored password and no scraped session.
Three things, in order: it answers only from the knowledge you approved; anything beyond your permission limits stops for approval; and in draft-only mode nothing is sent at all. Most businesses spend their first week in the third of those.
Yes. Every action is recorded with the rule it acted under and the evidence it used, and the conversation is on the customer's record in full.
Your mailboxes, contacts and history remain yours. Disconnecting a channel stops Connect acting on it; it does not take your data with it.
START HERE
The pilot starts in draft only for exactly this reason: the fastest way to judge an operating loop is to watch it run on your real week and then decide.