Two-way customer support

The need

Customers reply to the number you send from. Most SMS providers treat that reply as a webhook to be handled by someone else's software, or drop it entirely. The result is a channel that is only half a channel: you can talk, they cannot answer.

If people already write to you on SMS, that traffic needs a place to be read, sorted and answered by a human.

The setup

1. A shared inbox. Every SMS your phones receive opens or continues a thread, with the full history of the exchange. Several people can work it from their own account.
2. Sorting that stays small. A thread is open, pending or resolved. Three states, deliberately: beyond that an inbox becomes a taxonomy nobody maintains. Labels carry the rest.
3. Assignment. A thread belongs to someone, and the header says so, which is what stops two people answering the same person twice.
4. An automatic first reply. A keyword rule can acknowledge out of hours, or answer a common question before anyone reads the thread.
5. Roles. An operator answers and sorts; only a superadmin changes settings, pairs phones or reads the technical logs.

What to watch

The reply leaves from the number your correspondent already knows. The thread pins the SIM that received the first message, so the exchange stays with one identity instead of arriving from whichever line was free.

Search stays on your machine. The full-text index of the message bodies lives in your own database, and no query ever leaves it.

Inbound from services. Short codes and sender names such as your bank or your carrier are refused by default, so marketing from your operator does not fill the inbox your team reads. Add the ones you do want in Settings, Reception.