What is team inbox?

A team inbox is the shared view where your people see every conversation as it happens, take over the ones the AI agent hands off, assign them to each other and close them. It is the human half of an AI support product. In a helpdesk the same role is played by the ticket queue; in live chat tools by the agent console.

It matters because the inbox decides what a handoff is worth. The useful parts are unglamorous: filters by status and assignee, the full transcript above the composer, the visitor's email and device details beside it, internal notes a visitor never sees, and some way to export conversations for review. Products differ most on what happens after a teammate replies: whether the reply reaches the visitor by chat only, by email, or both, and whether the agent resumes afterwards or stays silent.

Where the idea runs out: an inbox is not a helpdesk. It usually has no SLA timers, no merging, no public ticket numbers and no email channel of its own, which is why most AI support products also integrate with Zendesk, Freshdesk or Zoho Desk for teams that need those. And an inbox nobody watches is a place where conversations wait, so a team that answers by email later needs the agent to say so rather than promise a live reply.