Teams
Group several contacts into one view, and share their conversations with teammates — with control over exactly which conversations they see.
Several people often represent a single customer. Say Northwind Clinical has two reps, Priya and Marcus: they each text and email you, and sometimes you are all on a group thread together. If you watch just one of them, you miss the rest.
A team fixes that. Group those contacts into one team. Open it. You see every conversation that touches any of them — 1:1 SMS, 1:1 email, and email group threads — in one list.
A team can also do more than organize your own view. Share it with a teammate at the right permission level, and the team grants access. Your teammate reads the team's conversations — and replies, if you allow it — without access to the underlying email account or phone number. You choose exactly which conversations the team shares.
Create a team
Open Teams
Click Teams in the left sidebar to open the team directory, then New team.
Name it and pick a color
Give the team a name (for example, Northwind Clinical) and an accent color, so it is easy to spot in the list.
Add members
Search and add the people who belong to this team. You can add a whole contact — the team then follows all of their phone numbers and email addresses. Or you can add an individual email or phone line, for addresses you have not saved as a contact. CommSync hides lines already covered by a contact you have added, so nothing is double-counted.
Open its conversations
In the Teams directory, hover a team and click the conversations button on the right. Its threads appear in the list; click one to read and reply, exactly like the inbox.
What shows up in a team
When you open a team, it lists every conversation that touches any member contact:
- 1:1 SMS and 1:1 email threads with each member.
- Email group threads where two or more members appear together — these show once, not once per member.
Coverage follows each contact's channels automatically. Add a new phone number or email address to a contact and the team picks up its threads with no extra setup. CommSync hides archived, trashed, and Spam threads so junk does not clutter the team view; Promotions and Automated messages still show.
Share a team
A team is private to you by default. To share it:
Open the team
Click the team in the Teams directory to open its detail panel — or, while you read its conversations, click the gear in the list header. Both open the same panel.
Add teammates
Switch to the Sharing tab, search for a teammate, and choose their permission level.
Permission levels
| Level | What they can do |
|---|---|
| Lens | Sees the team as a filter over their own channel access. Grants nothing — they see only conversations they can already open. |
| Can view | Reads all of the team's shared conversations, even without channel access, and joins each one's team comments. |
| Can send | Everything in Can view, plus reply — from a line they own. |
| Can manage | Everything in Can send, plus rename the team, add and remove contacts, choose which conversations share, and manage sharing. |
The team owner, and your organization's owners and admins, can always manage a team.
Who can grant access
Lens never grants access, so anyone who manages the team can hand it out. Can view, Can send, and Can manage grant real access to conversations. Only the team owner, or an organization owner or admin, can choose those levels. Also, a team never widens its own creator's access — the grant works only for the teammates who receive it.
Replies come from your own lines
A teammate with Can send replies from a line they own — their own connected mailbox or number of the same kind as the conversation. The share never lets anyone send from a line they do not hold. If they own no line of the right kind, the composer offers no sending line.
Choose which conversations share
You do not have to share everything the team covers. In the Sharing tab, click Choose conversations… to open the picker. Uncheck any conversation you want to keep out. Checked conversations share; unchecked ones stay private to the people with channel access. The picker searches and scrolls through the team's full coverage, so it works even when a team covers thousands of threads.
A conversation someone marked Keep out of team and contact shares shows a lock in the picker. That flag wins — see Sharing a conversation.
New conversations: automatic, or reviewed
The picker also asks what happens when a new conversation enters the team's coverage later:
- Share new conversations automatically (default) — a new conversation is visible to teammates right away.
- Ask me about new conversations — new conversations wait for your OK before teammates see them.
With review on, a red badge on the team row and on the Teams rail entry counts the conversations that wait. A banner also appears above the team's thread list. Click either one to open the review queue — the same picker, filtered to the pending conversations — and include or exclude each one. Only people who manage the team see the badge and the queue.
Lens members are unaffected
The conversation picker and the review queue control only what the team shares. A teammate on Lens — and anyone with their own channel access — continues to see their own conversations in the team view either way.
Further reading
- Sharing a conversation — share one specific conversation, with a link or with named teammates.
- Team comments — the discussion panel on every shared conversation.
- Shared contacts — share a single contact, with comments and per-member permits.
- Roles & permissions — the org-level access model underneath.