The list on the left of your Inbox is built to be read without opening anything. Each row carries enough that you can triage your queue from the pills alone, and this explains what every one of them means.
What it does
Every conversation your store has ever had shows up here, newest activity first by default. Each row shows the customer's name, a ticket number, how long ago something last happened, the subject line, and a row of small pills describing the conversation's state. Clicking a row opens the full thread in the center panel.
Where to find it
The Inbox is the left-hand panel of /app/conversations. It is always visible, and the conversation you have open renders to its right.
How it works
The pills, left to right. Every row can carry up to six:
Status: one of Open, AI, Awaiting customer, Awaiting reply, Escalated, Resolved, or Closed. This is a lifecycle pill. It tells you where the conversation sits, not who is working it.
Awaiting approval: shows when Arbyn has prepared an action on this conversation and is holding it for your sign-off: a refund, a cancellation, an order edit, an address change or a return. If more than one is waiting, the pill carries the count ("Awaiting approval · 2"). This is the only pill on the row that names something you have to do rather than something that happened, which is why it sits first after Status.
Escalation reason: only on an Escalated row, a second pill names why (for example "Custom rule: VIP refund cap"), truncated if it runs long. This comes straight from the reason Arbyn recorded when it handed the conversation to your team.
Handler: either Arbyn (purple) or Human (orange). This is separate from Status. A conversation can be Escalated status and still show Arbyn as the handler until someone takes it over, because Escalated means "flagged for your team," not "your team is already replying."
Priority: only shows for High or Urgent. Low and Medium stay invisible on purpose so the row isn't cluttered with the common case.
Sentiment: only shows for Negative or Very negative, read from the customer's own last message. Positive and neutral sentiment never get a pill; the signal is only useful when it needs your attention.
Channel: Email, Chat, IG, or FB. A chat conversation that has also seen an email exchange (the customer replied by email to something that bridged out, or vice versa) shows a distinct "Chat + Email" pill instead of just one channel.
The purple dot. A small dot next to the customer's name means the conversation needs a human decision. It does not mean "there's a new message" in the literal sense. Arbyn deliberately hides the dot on conversations it already handled (closed, resolved, AI-handled, human-handled) even if the last message was inbound, because there's nothing left for you to act on. If your store is in Live mode, the dot is even narrower: it only lights up for conversations sitting in Draft, Escalated, or Queued, because in Live mode Arbyn is actively answering everything else itself. If your store is still in Calibration/Observe mode, the dot is broader, since you're the one reviewing every reply before it sends.
Multi-channel avatars aside, the rest of the row is text-only by design. An earlier design showed a message snippet under the subject; it was removed because reading the actual thread is one click away and the snippet was rarely worth the space.
Views (the tabs). Three tabs sit on their own row above the list: All, Unresolved, Escalated. A More views button next to Compose opens the rest: Resolved, Awaiting customer, Needs reply, Drafts, Snoozed, Closed. Selecting one from the popover swaps the active view and shows its name in the button itself, so you don't lose track of which overflow view you're on. Each tab (primary or overflow) shows a count in parentheses when it's non-zero; a tab at zero shows no count at all rather than "(0)".
Two counts on this screen mean different things, deliberately. The "· N" next to the Inbox heading at the top is your whole shop's conversation count, unaffected by any filter you have open. The numbers in the tab pills are each tab's own queue depth, also unaffected by search or the Filter popover. Neither one is "how many rows are showing right now"; that number, when it matters, is in the pagination bar at the bottom of the list.
Selecting rows. Check the box on any row (or several) to reveal three bulk actions at the top of the list: Resolve, Close, and Snooze 24h. Selecting rows works across up to 100 conversations at once. Going through Shopify-side actions (refunds, cancellations) still has to happen one conversation at a time from inside each thread.
Pagination. The list shows 25 conversations per page. With more than one page, Previous/Next controls appear at the bottom with a "Page X of Y · N total" label. With everything fitting on one page, that same space just shows the total count.
Good to know
"Unresolved" is the term you'll see, not "Open." They mean the same thing in this product: anything not Resolved, not Closed, and not sitting in the brief in-between state right after an auto-close nudge.
A conversation vanishes from every regular tab while it's snoozed, including All. The Snoozed view (under More views) is the only place to find it until it wakes up or you un-snooze it.
The Handler pill can say Human even on a conversation you haven't personally touched. It flips to Human the moment anyone on your team takes over, or the moment a merchant-composed conversation is created (see the Compose article). Arbyn does not draft or send anything on those until it's explicitly handed back.
Longest waiting isn't "oldest." It measures how long the customer has been waiting on you, so it deliberately excludes anything already Resolved, Closed, Awaiting customer (ball's in their court), or in the brief awaiting-close-confirmation state. A stale conversation you already handled doesn't win that sort just because nobody touched it since.
FAQ
Why does a conversation have no dot even though the customer just wrote in? Either your row is Closed, Resolved, already handled by a human, or already answered by Arbyn (AI status), and the dot only lights up for conversations that still need a human decision. Or, if your store is in Live mode, it's a state Arbyn owns end to end and the dot is intentionally narrower there.
A row says "Awaiting approval". Where do I actually approve it? Open the conversation and use the card in the right-hand panel, which takes you to the Approvals page filtered to just that conversation. Approving from there is the same single action as approving from the full Approvals queue. That is deliberate: there is one place the decision is actually carried out, so two screens can never disagree about what you approved.
Why did this pill not exist before? It genuinely did not, and it was possible to work an inbox top to bottom and resolve a conversation without ever learning Arbyn was holding a refund on it. The only way to find held actions was to remember to check the Approvals page separately. The pill closes that gap.
What does the "Chat + Email" pill mean? The thread started on one channel and continued on the other, most often a chat conversation that got bridged to email because the customer's last message before yours arrived by email, so Arbyn (or you) replied there instead of leaving them without an answer.
Can I select more than one page of conversations for a bulk action? No. Selection works within the currently loaded 25-row page; bulk actions run against exactly the rows you've checked.
Why is Resolved not one of the three main tabs? It's in More views on purpose, to keep the primary row to the tabs merchants click most: everything, unresolved work, and anything escalated to a human.