The short answer
A colleague can see a conversation and you cannot, or conversations you used to handle have disappeared. Nine times out of ten this is not a bug: it is brand access. Somebody decided which brands you work in, and your inbox shows those and nothing else.
Access is granted per brand
Access used to be given one chat widget at a time. It is now given one brand at a time, and a single brand covers all of the following at once:
- The conversations that come in through that brand's chat widget — website chat, email, Facebook Messenger and Instagram.
- The phone calls its voice agents answer.
- That brand's own section in the left menu, with its Knowledge, Vex, Voice and settings pages.
Who is exempt
Owners and administrators bypass brand access completely — they always see every brand, and no switch will change that.
Board access works differently on purpose, and it is worth knowing the difference before you go looking for a bug: only owners bypass board access. An administrator can genuinely be restricted to certain feedback boards while still seeing every brand's conversations.
What to ask your admin for
Ask an owner or an admin to grant you the brand. There are two places they can do it, and both write the same grant:
- Click your own name and picture at the bottom of the left menu, choose Manage team, expand your row, and switch the brand on under Brand access. The change has to be saved.
- Or open Brand → Chat widget → Features → Inbox access and switch you on there. Ticking someone in that list grants them the whole brand, not just that one widget.
Brands can also be granted at the moment someone is invited. The invitation carries a set of permissions and a set of brands, summarised as something like "8 permissions · 2 brands", and exactly those are applied when the invitation is accepted.
Two more rules that catch people out
- A brand you have not been granted never appears — not even a brand that has no chat widget at all.
- Being removed from the organisation clears your access. If you were removed and later added back, your brand access, board access and shift-type assignments all start from nothing and have to be granted again.
Why a transfer was refused
If you try to hand a conversation to a colleague who has not been granted that conversation's brand, the server refuses the transfer rather than moving it somewhere they cannot open. Your colleague needs the brand first; then the transfer goes through.
This is not the same as the inbox filters
The Filters button in the inbox has a Channels group and a Widgets group. Those only change what you are looking at right now, and the count on the button tells you how many are active — click Clear and everything you have access to comes back. If clearing the filters does not bring a conversation back, it is access, not a filter.
The Calls view is a separate switch
The Calls row under Inbox needs the Voice & calls permission on top of brand access. Without the permission the row is not in your menu at all; with the permission but without the brand, the row is there and the brand's calls are not. See Phone calls in your inbox.
What's next
For everything else the inbox can do, see Tour of the inbox.