Communications

Orb Ledger’s communications surface covers every channel through which your team interacts with contacts, brokers, and the broader market: a unified WhatsApp/email inbox, AI-assisted reply drafting, broadcast messaging to WhatsApp groups, broker deal-flow threads, and a system notification center. All features are scoped to your organization — no data crosses tenant boundaries.

Messages travel over WhatsApp (via the connected number) and email (via your configured outbound address). Connecting those transports is covered in the Integrations section; this guide covers using the features once the transports are live.

Unified Inbox

What it is. A four-pane workspace — folder rail, conversation list, chat stream, and a context drawer — that consolidates every inbound and outbound WhatsApp conversation in one place. Conversations are organized into folders (system-created and custom) and conversations can be searched, filtered, tagged, and assigned. The inbox supports both 1-on-1 contacts and WhatsApp group chats.

What you can do here.

• Read and reply to conversations using the rich composer, which supports text, media, emoji, and message quoting.
• Start a new outbound conversation with any contact from your CRM.
• Organize conversations into folders (system folders include Inbox, Brokers, Investors, Team, Groups, Suppliers; custom folders can be added and conversations dragged into them).
• Tag conversations, assign them to team members, pin, snooze, or archive threads.
• Bulk-select conversations to apply tags, archive, or assign in one action.
• Mark conversations as read individually or by folder.
• Search conversations and messages globally (Cmd+K opens the command palette).
• View a contact’s CRM profile, deal history, and conversation cross-reference in the context drawer without leaving the chat.
• See which teammates are currently viewing or typing in the inbox (presence indicators).
• Review and act on @-mention notifications from teammates who left notes inside conversations.
• Switch to simplified mode for a lighter view; advanced mode (owner/admin/manager) unlocks the full feature set including presence, bulk actions, the draft queue, and @-mentions.

Who can access. The inbox requires the inbox.use capability. This is granted to owner, admin (legacy role treated as owner), manager, and staff. The roles seller, broker, investor, and viewer do not have inbox access by default (owners can grant it via per-member permission overrides).

AI Reply Queue

What it is. A review screen for AI-generated reply drafts. Every three minutes, a background process scans incoming messages classified as questions or answers and generates a suggested reply using Anthropic Claude. Those drafts land here for a human reviewer to approve, edit, or discard before anything is sent.

What you can do here.

• View pending draft replies alongside the original triggering message.
• Approve a draft as-is to send it immediately, or edit the draft text and approve the modified version (“Edit & send”).
• Discard drafts you do not want sent.
• Browse previously sent, edited-and-sent, and discarded drafts on their respective tabs.
• Search drafts by contact name or draft body text.
• See a cron health strip showing when the auto-draft job last ran, how many drafts were generated in the last 24 hours, and average AI confidence.

Who can access. Requires inbox.use. Same audience as the Unified Inbox: owner, admin, manager, staff.

Inbox Analytics

What it is. A reporting view that surfaces conversation volume, response-time, and operational metrics for the inbox. The route (/admin/inbox/analytics) re-exports the shared reports inbox page.

What you can do here.

• View message volume trends over time.
• See response-time and handling metrics by folder and team member.
• Identify anomalies flagged by the AI anomaly-check process.
• Access conversation lifecycle reports broken down by watch brand and reference number.

Who can access. Requires inbox.use. Owner, admin, manager, staff.

Auto-Rules (Inbox Automation)

What it is. A condition-and-action rule engine that evaluates every incoming broker item extracted from WhatsApp and automatically takes an action — passing a deal, liking it, snoozing it, flagging it for review, tagging it, or marking it urgent — without human intervention. Rules are evaluated in priority order (lower number = earlier).

What you can do here.

• Create rules with a visual conditions builder that targets fields such as brand, model, reference number, asking price, condition, AI-extracted intent, broker tier, broker conversion rate, and wishlist match score.
• Set the match combinator to ALL (every condition must be true) or ANY (at least one must be true).
• Choose from six actions: Pass, Like, Snooze (with configurable hours), Flag, Tag, Urgent.
• Install pre-built starter rules from the library and customize them afterward.
• Enable or disable rules individually without deleting them.
• Adjust rule priority using a 0–1000 slider.
• Test a rule against a sample message and item JSON in the built-in test panel to see whether it would match and what it would do, before saving.
• Review a live “Recent fires” feed showing which rule fired on which contact and when.
• See per-rule stats: how many items the rule caught in the last 7 days and when it last fired.

Who can access. Reading and writing auto-rules requires inbox.admin. This capability is held by owner and admin only. Managers and staff can use the inbox but cannot create or modify automation rules.

Copilot Knowledge Base

What it is. A document store that powers the AI Copilot’s ability to answer customer questions. When a composer surfaces AI suggestions or a draft reply is generated, Anthropic Claude retrieves the most relevant chunks from this knowledge base (via semantic search) to ground its answers in your business’s own content — shipping policies, authentication guides, brand cheat-sheets, FAQ entries, and similar reference material.

What you can do here.

• Add documents by pasting plain text or Markdown directly into the form, or by providing a public URL (.txt, .md, .json) for the system to fetch.
• View the library of ingested documents with chunk counts and creation dates.
• Monitor how many total chunks are in the knowledge base.

Who can access. Requires inbox.admin. Owner and admin only.

WhatsApp Directory (Staged Contacts)

What it is. An address-book view of the WhatsApp contacts and groups on your linked number, separate from the CRM contacts list. When a WhatsApp sync runs, every phone number the number has ever messaged appears here as a “staged contact” — a holding area before it is promoted into the full CRM.

What you can do here.

• Trigger a WhatsApp sync to pull the latest contacts and groups from the linked number into the staging area.
• Review staged contacts and promote selected ones to full CRM contacts.
• Manage the WhatsApp group roster: rename groups for display in the inbox, remove groups from the directory.
• Navigate to the CRM contacts list for further management.

Who can access. Requires inbox.use. Owner, admin, manager, staff.

WhatsApp Message Templates

What it is. A two-pane manager for WhatsApp Business message templates — pre-approved message structures required by Meta for initiating outbound conversations (as opposed to replying within a 24-hour window). Each template has a name, language, category (Utility, Marketing, Authentication), header, body with variable placeholders, footer, and optional action buttons. A live preview renders the template as it will appear in WhatsApp.

What you can do here.

• Create new templates as drafts.
• Edit template name, language, category, header (text or media), body, footer, and call-to-action buttons.
• Submit a draft template to Meta for WhatsApp Business approval directly from the interface.
• Monitor approval status (draft, pending, approved, rejected) and view rejection reasons.
• Send a real test message of a template to a phone number to verify rendering before using it in production.
• Delete templates (cannot be undone; the template is immediately removed from the composer).
• Search templates by name or body content.

Who can access. Reading templates requires inbox.admin; creating and editing also requires inbox.admin. Owner and admin only.

General Message Templates

What it is. A channel-agnostic template library covering WhatsApp, email, SMS, and general-purpose templates. Unlike the WhatsApp-specific template manager above (which handles Meta approval flows), this library is a simpler store of reusable message bodies with named variable placeholders that team members can pull from when composing messages across any channel.

What you can do here.

• Create templates with a name, channel designation, body text with {{variable}} placeholders, and a list of variable names.
• Edit and delete existing templates.
• Submit WhatsApp-channel templates to Meta for approval from within this list.
• View Meta approval status on WhatsApp templates.

Who can access. Reading requires broadcast.use (owner, admin, manager, staff). Creating, editing, and deleting requires broadcast.admin (owner and admin only).

Broadcast

What it is. A guided three-step composer — Content, Audience, Review & Send — for sending watch listing announcements or “wanted” watch requests to multiple WhatsApp groups simultaneously. The system sends messages sequentially with configurable pacing (cautious, normal, fast, aggressive, or custom) to reduce ban risk, and supports scheduling a broadcast for a future date and time.

What you can do here.

• Compose a listing broadcast: select one or more watches from current inventory, optionally attach photos, write or generate a caption (the AI caption generator uses Anthropic Claude), and preview the message bubble.
• Compose a “wanted” broadcast: describe a watch you are seeking (brand, model, reference, condition, budget, reference photo) and broadcast it as a buying inquiry.
• Select recipient groups by tag, set, individual selection, or engagement score; filter out groups that already received the same listing today.
• Organize groups into saved Group Sets for quick reuse across broadcasts.
• Review a full dry-run before sending: total messages, listings, unique groups, and estimated send time, with per-listing cards showing exactly which groups each listing reaches.
• Monitor a live progress feed during sending: per-group status (queued, sending, sent, skipped, failed), cooldown countdowns, and final sent/skipped/failed tallies.
• Cancel an in-progress broadcast.
• Browse broadcast history and resend a past broadcast.
• Manage saved broadcast templates for reuse.

Who can access. Requires broadcast.use. Owner, admin, manager, staff.

Broadcast Auto-Replies

What it is. A keyword-, regex-, and AI-intent-triggered rule engine for automatically responding to inbound WhatsApp messages. Auto-replies are distinct from inbox auto-rules: they fire on the raw inbound message text (keyword match, regex match, or LLM-classified intent) and send a rendered response back to the sender, without requiring human intervention.

What you can do here.

• Create rules specifying a trigger type (keyword, regex, or LLM intent classification), trigger value, and a response template supporting {{sender_name}} as a variable.
• Scope rules to DMs only, groups only, or both.
• Optionally restrict a rule to fire only when the sender received a broadcast from your number in the last 72 hours.
• Set rule priority (lower number = evaluated first) to control which rule fires when multiple rules could match.
• Enable and disable rules individually.
• Test a rule against a sample message in a sandbox (nothing is sent to WhatsApp, no data is saved) to verify it matches and see the rendered response.
• View per-rule and aggregate metrics: total classified messages, auto-replies sent, messages gated, per-rule fire and success rates, intent distribution with average confidence scores, and a daily volume chart. Metrics are available in 7d, 30d, and 90d windows.

Who can access. Reading auto-reply rules and metrics requires broadcast.use (owner, admin, manager, staff). Creating, editing, and deleting rules requires broadcast.admin (owner and admin only).

Broker Inbox and Broker Messages

What it is. /admin/broker-inbox and /admin/broker-messages are redirects to the Unified Inbox filtered to the brokers folder. The brokers system folder aggregates all conversations with your broker network so deal submissions, price quotes, and confirmations are separated from general customer conversations.

What you can do here. All Unified Inbox capabilities apply within the brokers folder context. See the Unified Inbox section above for the full action list.

Who can access. Requires inbox.use. Owner, admin, manager, staff.

Notification Center

What it is. A chronological feed of system-generated notifications for the current user, covering events such as inventory updates, investor activity, sales events, and platform alerts.

What you can do here.

• View all notifications or filter to unread only.
• Mark individual notifications as read by selecting them.
• Mark all notifications as read in one action.
• Navigate paginated results (20 per page).

Who can access. Requires tasks.use. This capability is held by owner, admin, manager, and staff. Viewer, seller, broker, and investor roles do not have access to the notification center by default.