Conversations
Conversations is the shared worklist your coordinators work from. Every conversation the assistant handles (a phone call, a text, a portal message, or an email) lands in one list, tagged with its channel, rather than in a separate inbox per channel.
It replaces the older Phone Agent dashboard. The views that dashboard offered are still here, as tabs.
The worklist
The worklist is the landing tab and the one your team lives in: everything waiting on the clinic (voice, text, email and portal messages) oldest first, so the top row is the person who has been waiting longest.
Each row shows who the conversation is with (tagged with its channel), the last message, how long it has been waiting, and its status. The waiting time is coloured against the clinic's same-day reply goal, and a dot beside the name means nobody on your team has read it yet.
After about an hour of silence the assistant's text session with a patient ends, the next message they send simply starts a fresh one. That is the only thing that times out. The messages themselves stay on the person's record, and a message nobody has answered stays in this list until someone replies, snoozes it, or marks it done.
The same-day reply goal
The clinic aims to answer every patient message the same business day:
- a message that arrives on a weekday before 4 pm (clinic time) is due by the end of that day;
- a message that arrives later, or at the weekend, is due by the end of the next weekday.
The goal is to meet this for 90% of messages. The waiting time on each row shows where that conversation stands: amber with Due today while the deadline is later today, red with Late once it has passed. Hover over the time to see the exact deadline. A conversation the assistant escalated to your team is held to the same goal, counted from when it was escalated. Work Late first, then Due today.
The goal only colours the rows; it doesn't change which view a conversation is in or the order of the list. How the clinic is doing, week by week, is on the Suggestion impact page (Prospects, In-Progress tab, next to Suggest best order): the share of messages answered the same business day, the median time to a reply, messages nobody answered, conversations marked Done without a reply, and which screen replies were sent from. See Suggestion impact, and Your daily intake routine for the routine built around it.
Saved views
Rather than a row of filters to assemble, three named views sit above the list, each showing a count taken across the whole queue, not just the page in front of you:
| View | Who's in it |
|---|---|
| Unanswered | Conversations the clinic still owes an answer to. |
| Over an hour | The ones that have been waiting longest. In a healthy clinic this is legitimately empty for most of the day. |
| Everything | The whole queue. The default, and the way back out of a narrowing. |
An Unread counter sits beside them, and you can sort by newest waiting or by most recent activity instead of oldest. A view with no number beside it means the count hasn't loaded yet, not that it's empty.
How the rows are grouped
The list arrives already sorted into blocks, each under a heading that says what kind of attention the rows beneath it need:
- Did not reach them: the last message the clinic sent did not arrive.
- Waiting for a reply: the clinic owes this person an answer.
- Waiting on the patient: you answered; they haven't come back.
Headings deliberately carry no counts. The page holds only part of each group, so a number there would describe the page rather than the group, the counts belong on the saved views, where they describe whole sets.
What your team can do from a row
- Open a conversation for the full detail: the timeline across every channel, the transcript of a call, and any callback request or collected detail waiting for action. Opening it marks it read.
- Take over a conversation the assistant has escalated, moving it from the assistant to a person.
- Resolve one once it's handled, so the list reflects what still needs attention. On a text, portal or email thread Resolve works whenever you press it, and closes the patient's open window itself; on a phone call it waits for the call to end.
- Mark it done, which clears the row's needs-attention flag without closing the conversation. Use it for messages that need no answer, like "Ok, thanks": each time a conversation is marked done, the system notes whether anyone had replied first, and conversations marked done without a reply are counted in the weekly report.
- Snooze it, the "not yet" answer, for a conversation you can't act on until something else happens. Choose in two hours or tomorrow morning and the row leaves the list until then. A running count of what you've deferred sits at the foot of the list, with a control to bring it all back.
Taking over a live call
A phone escalation stays in the list after the caller hangs up, because it is the callback queue. Most of the time Take over on a call is follow-up work on a call that has already ended: nothing is dialed, and you call the person back on the number shown.
When the call is still in progress, Take over rings a phone and joins the caller to whoever answers:
- Your own phone number, from your profile (avatar menu, manage your profile, Personal info). The page says it is calling your phone now.
- If you have none, the clinic's fallback number, which an administrator sets under Settings, Phone Line, "Fallback number for take-overs and automatic transfer" (for example the front desk). The page says it is ringing that number.
- If there is neither, nobody is rung. Before you claim the call, a warning says This call can't ring you and offers Take over anyway. Afterwards a red notice stays on the page with the number to call the caller back on. The caller is not left waiting in silence: they are still with the assistant, which has already told them the care team will call back.
While the phone rings, the caller hears a short please hold message and then hold music. The phone rings for about 25 seconds:
- Someone answers: they hear "This is a call from the clinic's phone assistant. A caller is waiting to be connected." straight away, then "You are now connected to the caller." and are joined.
- The phone system isn't sure a person picked up, for example after a long greeting or silence: the person who answered is asked, in English, to press 1. Any key joins them. With no key, the caller hears the callback message.
- Nobody answers, the line is busy, or the call is declined: the caller is told that nobody could take the call right now and that someone will call back, and the call ends politely. The conversation stays claimed by you, so it is still yours to call back, and a red notice shows the number.
- A voicemail box answers: it can't press a key, so it is hung up. A caller is never put through to a voicemail box; they hear the same callback message. The box may record the short line and the press 1 prompt, never the caller.
If the caller hangs up while your phone is still ringing, the ringing stops.
What the caller and the person who answered say after they are joined is added to the call's transcript, marked as caller and staff lines.
If your clinic uses automatic transfer during clinic hours, an escalated call may already be ringing the fallback number. Take over then doesn't claim the call, and a notice says it is being put through by automatic transfer and stays in the list for a callback if that line doesn't answer. When the fallback line does answer, the conversation stays in the list, unclaimed, with a notice that someone at the clinic answered: check with them before calling the patient back.
Take over can only ring you if your profile has a phone number. Add a direct line, extension or mobile under Personal info, or ask an administrator to set the clinic's fallback number. The fallback must not be the assistant's own number or a line that forwards to it, or the caller would reach the assistant again.
Done clears the needs-attention flag, which reads as this has been handled. For a conversation you simply can't answer yet, Snooze is the honest answer and it brings the row back on its own. A conversation marked done with no reply shows up in the weekly count of exactly that.
Because read state is tracked per person, the list distinguishes what your team has already looked at from what nobody has picked up yet.
When the list is empty it tells you which kind of empty it is: you're all caught up is a claim about the whole queue, while nothing in this view right now means only that the view you picked is narrow, and offers to show everything again.
New message starts a conversation from the clinic's side: pick the person, pick the channel, write the message. The channel step tells you which channels that person can actually be reached on before you write anything, so a refusal never arrives after you've composed.
The reply inbox
Reply inbox is a second view of the same queue, built for working straight down it: the list on the left, the conversation you picked on the right, and the reply box under it. Nothing is lost by using it, the tabbed Conversations page and the full conversation record are both still there.
- Picking a row opens it beside the queue. Phone calls can't be answered here, the pane says so and points you at opening the call to listen to it.
- The actions move into the pane's header (snooze, open the full record, mark done), so the queue itself stays readable.
- A sent reply is held for a few seconds with a Stop control, so a reply sent by mistake can be caught before it leaves.
- It is built for the keyboard: move between conversations, jump into the reply box, send-and-move-on, mark done, snooze, or open the full record without reaching for the mouse. The page carries its own shortcut list.
- When the person can be reached by email or the portal but no conversation exists there yet, the reply box offers Start a conversation by Email (or by Portal) in place of a greyed-out row. Switching a reply to another channel looks at the person's whole history, so an existing email thread is found rather than a second one started.
Every reply records the screen it was sent from (the Reply inbox, the conversation page, a prospect's or patient's record, or New message), so the weekly report can show where your team actually answers patients.
Claiming a conversation pauses the assistant
When somebody on your team claims a conversation, the assistant stops answering that person on every channel, text included, until a staff member resumes it from the Claimed tab. A conversation is claimed when you take it over, and when you start one with New message.
That includes phone calls. When someone whose conversation is claimed calls the clinic's number, the assistant greets them and, once they speak, does not answer. They hear that a member of the care team is already looking after their request and will call them back, a callback is queued (the reason reads Called while a coordinator was handling), and the call ends. What they said appears on the conversation. A caller who describes a medical emergency hears the emergency direction instead. This relies on the caller's number matching a patient or prospect; a number the system doesn't recognise is answered as usual.
Two things deliberately still happen, because they are compliance instructions rather than conversation: a patient replying STOP is always opted out and START always re-subscribes them, whoever is holding the thread.
The patient's own message is always recorded either way. Only the automated reply is withheld.
When the assistant sent nothing
A patient message the assistant deliberately did not answer (the conversation was claimed, or your clinic's approved replies are set to Strict and nothing approved covers it) shows a short note under it: No automatic reply sent., and Passed to a coordinator. when a coordinator item was raised for it. There is no reply bubble, because nothing was sent. That is deliberate: a person on your team owns the answer. A patient closing an exchange with "thanks" or "ok" gets the first line only, and pages nobody.
A reply you send from the conversation page by Portal goes to the patient's live portal thread, and the history shows a portal message as the text the patient read.
Check the Claimed tab. A conversation somebody claimed and never resumed is the usual reason, resuming it hands the person back to the assistant.
Whether a message actually arrived
Under each outgoing text, the conversation timeline says what the carrier reported. There are three answers, not two:
| What it says | What it means |
|---|---|
| Delivered | The carrier confirmed it arrived. This is the only label that asserts the patient got it. |
| Undelivered / Failed to deliver | The carrier said it did not arrive, or the text could never be sent (for example to a number in a region texting is not enabled for). Such a text is not retried in the background. |
| Delivery not confirmed | Nobody has reported on it either way. |
"Delivery not confirmed" does not mean "not sent." It covers a message still waiting on its delivery report and messages that genuinely went out but can never be matched back to one. The wording is deliberately weak because that is the strongest thing the data supports. The alternative was showing nothing at all, which reads as fine and is how a message nobody had confirmed came to look exactly like one the carrier had.
A text a staff member sends that the carrier refuses outright (for example to a number that has opted out) appears in the thread marked Failed to deliver, and in the worklist with other delivery failures. Sending only queues a text, so the composer cannot know at the time; the thread is where the answer lands.
This also now appears on automated messages (outreach and reminders); which is the one lane no human watches leave. A carrier reporting a failure there used to show nothing at all.
Delivery reporting is a text-message thing. Calls are spoken aloud, and portal and email messages have no carrier report to wait for, so no label appears there.
The other tabs
| Tab | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Worklist | Everything waiting on the clinic, oldest first. |
| Claimed | Conversations a staff member has already picked up. Show every assignee or just your own, flag the ones that have gone stale, then resume one or reassign it to somebody else. |
| Live Ops | Today's call totals and every voice session: active calls, how many the assistant resolved, how many escalated, average duration. Filter by status, resolution or caller, then open a call to read its transcript. |
| Missing Info | Details the assistant could not capture on a call. Enter the missing value and apply it to the referral, or dismiss it, see Referrals workflow. |
Live Ops and Missing Info are voice surfaces and appear only for staff who hold the phone-assistant permissions, as does the Reply inbox link. A coordinator who reaches Conversations through Messages sees the worklist and Claimed.
Every conversation for one person
A prospect's or patient's record carries its own Conversations panel, which shows every conversation with that person across channels (the call they made last week, the texts before it, a portal message) in one place, without your team going back to the worklist to piece it together.
A conversation is attached to a person only through a strong identifier: their prospect record, patient record, or referral. It is never attached on the strength of a phone number alone. This is deliberate: a shared household or family number would otherwise attribute one person's conversation to another. The trade-off is that a call from an unrecognised number won't appear on anybody's record until it's matched.
Channels
Voice, SMS, and portal conversations appear in the worklist wherever those channels are enabled for your clinic.
Email is a full conversation channel. Your team can reply to an email a patient sent, and can also start an email conversation from New message.
How much of it the assistant does is set per clinic:
| Mode | What the assistant does |
|---|---|
| Off | Nothing. Email conversations still arrive in the worklist and staff answer them by hand. This is the default. |
| Review | Replies are drafted for a staff member to approve before they go out. |
| Live | Replies are sent automatically. |
On Off, email is still collected and still appears in the worklist: the setting governs whether the assistant drafts or sends, not whether your team sees the conversation.
Starting an email conversation has conditions, and they are checked before you write anything:
- There must be an email address on file, the address must not have unsubscribed, and the patient must have consented to receive health information by email. Unlike an email reply, an email the clinic starts is refused outright without that consent, nobody asked us to write, so it fails closed rather than falling back to a secure link.
- The person needs a portal account, because that is where their reply comes back to. A prospect without one has it created as part of the send. A patient without one is enrolled. See below.
Re-sending the same message after a failure is safe: the system recognises the retry and no second email goes out.
Enrolling a patient so email can reach them
Most patients have never logged into the portal, so there is no account for their reply to arrive at. Starting an email conversation enrols them automatically wherever it safely can. This happens after the consent and unsubscribe checks, so a send that was going to be refused anyway never leaves an account behind.
It enrols when the address is unambiguously this patient's:
- They already have a portal account. Nothing is created.
- Nobody holds that address yet. A new portal account is created on the address from their record and linked to them.
- They had portal access that was withdrawn. Their own previous account is reactivated rather than duplicated.
- The address's account is the one from their own referral, before they became a patient. That is the same person, so it is linked.
A portal account can only ever resolve to one patient. So where the clinic's own records can't show that a mailbox is this patient's alone, the enrolment is refused and the email is not sent. That happens when another patient record carries the same address, when the address's account is already linked to a different patient, or when an account already exists on the address with nothing tying it to this patient.
This is not a rare case. A couple going through treatment together sharing one mailbox is the ordinary shape of a fertility patient, so your coordinators will meet this in normal work.
It is deliberate. Linking anyway wouldn't give the mailbox a second identity: it would quietly re-point the first, so one partner would sign in to the other's chart and their replies would land on the other's record, with nothing showing that anything had gone wrong.
The sender is told the address is shared and to ask an administrator. The fix is for somebody who knows the household to link the portal account deliberately, choosing whether the person is the patient themselves, a guardian, or a delegate. Once that link exists, sending the email needs no enrolment and simply works.
Enrolling a patient this way needs the same permission as linking a portal account by hand, so it stays with staff who are trusted to make that decision. Emailing a patient who is already enrolled creates nothing and doesn't need it. Links made automatically are marked as such, so they can be told apart from ones an administrator created.
Ask your Fertiligent contact before turning email on, it interacts with your clinic's mailbox setup.
By default an outbound email carries a secure deep link rather than the content itself, so personal health information stays inside the portal. Including full content in the email body requires both the patient's consent and a clinic setting to be turned on.
Who can see it
Access to the Conversations worklist is granted by role, and it is a separate permission from the one that controls the secure-message list, a staff member who can work conversations does not automatically get patient messaging, or the other way round. See Staff roles & permissions.
Availability
The Conversations worklist is available to clinics using Fertiligent messaging or the phone assistant, and each channel appears in it once that channel is enabled for your clinic (see Channels). The same-day reply goal (the 4 pm cut-off and the 90% target) is the same for every clinic for now. Ask your Fertiligent contact about enabling a channel.
Related
- Voice phone assistant: the assistant on the phone.
- Patient messaging & SMS: texting and secure messages.
- Prospect management & outreach: the funnel these conversations feed.