Managing user access is a cornerstone of a secure and efficient collaborative platform. Assigning the correct roles directly impacts customer response times, data security, and marketing effectiveness. This guide provides a detailed breakdown of available user roles, their specific permissions, and how to manage teams effectively.
1. Hierarchy of User Roles and Permissions
BusinessChat employs a tiered user management system to ensure sensitive operations and account-wide settings remain restricted to authorized personnel.
1.1 The Three Primary Users Roles
Owner: The single highest level of authority with complete and immutable control over the entire account. There is only one Owner per account, and this role cannot be modified or deactivated by any other user, including Admins.
Admin: The primary role for day-to-day management. Admins manage platform settings, teams, users, and operational assets.
User: The standard agent role is designed for team members directly involved in customer interactions. Their access is focused on managing conversations to minimize the risk of accidental changes to business settings.
1.2 Additional Granular Permissions
Specific permissions can be assigned to either the Admin or User role to expand capabilities without elevating primary authority.
Campaigns Permission: Grants access to the Main Dashboard, Campaigns, and Automations pages. This allows users to manage marketing campaigns and automations and view individual campaign reports.
Subscription Management Permission: Allows a user to manage the account’s subscription, pay invoices, and view payment card information.
This guide will now explore each role in detail, starting with the most powerful—the Owner.
2. Role-Specific Permissions and Limitations
2.1 Admin Permissions and Views
An Admin acts as a key figure in maintaining a smooth workflow for the entire team.
User Management: Can add new users, deactivate existing accounts, and change roles for any user except the Owner.
Operational Oversight: Has full access to all conversations across all teams, business settings (working hours, assignment limits), and all reports.
Asset Creation: Can create shared assets, including WhatsApp message templates, saved replies, and conversation topics.
Default View: Admins see the Inbox, Contacts, Chatbot, and Reports pages by default. Marketing-related pages and the Dashboard are hidden unless the "Campaigns" permission is explicitly toggled ON.
2.2 User Permissions and Views
The User role is streamlined to focus on operational customer engagement.
Conversation Management: Access is limited to conversations assigned directly to them or their assigned teams.
Data Restrictions: Users cannot browse the full contact database, see the "Total Contacts" count, or perform bulk exports. They can only view information for contacts they are actively communicating with. They can view Contact Groups to identify customer segments (e.g., "VIP Customers"), but they cannot see the complete list of contacts within those groups or export them. They cannot bulk import customer lists to the Businesschat platform; they can only manually add a new contact one by one if needed for a specific conversation.
Asset Limitations: Standard users cannot create WhatsApp templates, saved replies, or conversation topics.
Platform View: The Dashboard, Reports, Campaigns, Automations, and Chatbot tabs are hidden by default. If granted "Campaigns" permission, they gain access to marketing tabs both for automations and bulk campaigns, with the ability to see and download individual campaign reports. But they still cannot create new templates, access the general Reports page, or the Dashboard.
3. User Status and Operational States
User availability is tracked through a color-coded system visible in personal profiles or the Admin user list.
Status | Color | Description | Default For |
Active | Green | Logged in and available for automatic conversation assignment. | User role |
Watching | Yellow | Logged in but will NOT receive automatic assignments. Can monitor and manually take chats. | Owner & Admin roles |
Offline | N/A | User is not logged into the platform. This is only visible fromt he Users’ list from the settings. | N/A |
Managing Your Status Indicator
Users can find their current status indicator by clicking on their profile avatar at the bottom of the sidebar.
Visibility: The indicator appears next to the user's name in the expanded profile menu.
Manual Toggle: Users can manually change their status between Active and Watching by clicking the toggle button located next to the indicator.
4. User Account Management
4.1 Adding a New User
Only Owners and Admins can add new users.
Navigate to Account Settings and select Users.
Click New User and enter the Name, Email, Phone Number, and Role.
Select the Teams the user will belong to.
Toggle Campaigns or Subscription permissions as needed.
5. Click Send Invitation.
Note on User Limits: The number of users you can add is determined by your specific subscription plan; however, all plans include a minimum of five users.
Error Prevention when adding a new user: If an "Unexpected error" occurs, the email likely already exists on another BusinessChat account. Users cannot have multiple accounts with the same email address.
4.2 Editing a user permissions after being added to the account
Owners or Admins can edit a user's permissions any time, even after they've already set up their account and the user has accepted the invitation. To edit a user's permissions, follow these steps:
Navigate to Account Settings from your profile avatar
Click Users found under the General Settings
Choose the specific user you want to edit their permissionS and click the Edit button (Pencil icon)
Toggle On or Off the Marketing and Subscription permissions as need
Click Save
4.3 Deactivating and Reactivating Users
User accounts cannot be permanently deleted to preserve historical data and reporting integrity.
Deactivating a user
You can deactive a user if they’re no longer part of your team, following these steps:
Click the Pencil icon (Edit) next to a user
Select Deactivate.
Confirm that you want to reassign this user's active conversations to other team members, then click Deactivate Account to confirm.
Deactivation freezes account access and automatically reassigns active conversations to other team members. This action frees up a license/seat in the subscription plan.
Reactivating a previously deactivated user
Reactivation restores a user's access at any time. To reactivate a deactivated user, follow these steps:
Navigate to the Users list
Click the Activate User button next to their name.
5. Team Management
In the BusinessChat ecosystem, "Teams" are the primary mechanism for routing conversations, managing workloads, and enabling collaboration. They are functional groups (e.g., "Sales," "Support," "Returns") that allow you to direct customer inquiries to the correct set of experts and manage their capacity effectively. Every user on the platform must belong to at least one team.
Organizing users into teams provides several key benefits:
Targeted Routing: Allows the chatbot to direct specific types of customer inquiries to the correct group of experts automatically. You can choose this routing to be based on inbound inquiry type, location, etc. It all depends on how you've divided your teams and where you want each conversation to be routed.
Shared Inbox: Gives all team members access to a shared queue of conversations, enabling collaboration and ensuring no customer query is left waiting.
Workload Management: Enables settings like "Working Hours" and "Assignment Limits" to be applied to an entire group, helping to manage team availability and prevent agent burnout.
5.1 How to Add a New Team
To add a team on BusinessChat, you must be an Admin or Owner. Follow these steps to create a new team:
Navigate to Settings: Click on your profile avatar at the bottom of the screen and select Account Settings.
Open General Settings: Click on Teams.
Create Team: Click the Add Team button.
Name the Team: Enter a name for the team (e.g., "Sales" or "Support"), add an icon if you want and click Save.
Once created, you can click the Edit button (pencil icon) next to the team name to configure its specific settings.
5.2 Configure Team Settings
After you’ve created a new team, you can configure this specific teams’ settings by clicking the Pencil icon next to the team’s name. This allows you to configure different settings for each team, including working hours.
The team settings include 5 main rules, which we will discuss next.
Assignment Limit
Assignment limit caps the maximum number of "Open" conversations a user can handle simultaneously. If a user reaches this limit, the system stops assigning new chats until an existing one is closed.
If you do not configure a determined number of conversations, new inbound conversations will be distributed equally among all agents.
Cumulative Conversations Limits Logic: If Team A and Team B both have a limit of 3, a user belonging to both could receive up to 6 active chats (3 from each team).
Mandatory Topic Selection
Agents can be forced to select a topic (e.g., "Complaint") before closing a conversation to ensure accurate reporting, if this setting is enabled within the team settings.
Team members Conversation Access (Permissions)
This setting determines which conversations team members can see in their inboxes. There are generally four levels of visibility:
• Level 1 (Default): Users see their own chats, the team’s shared chats, and bot conversations. This doesn’t require changing this specific feature to grant default access to all conversations.
• Level 2 (Restrictive): Users see only the conversations assigned specifically to them.
• Level 3: Users see their own chats and the team's shared chats, but cannot see Bot conversations.
• Level 4 (Broad): Users can access conversations from their team and other specific teams you select.
Setting Team Working Hours
Admins can define operating hours for each team.
Go to Account Settings > Teams and click the Edit Pen.
Click Team Working Hours.
Toggle days as "Working Day" or "Day Off".
Shifts: You can set up to 4 different shifts for a single day by clicking + New Shift.
Check the account's Time Zone in General Settings to ensure hours match local time.
IMPORTANT NOTE: check the account's Time Zone settings, from the General Settings to ensure the working hours match the local time.
Adding or removing a user from a team
You can add users to a specific teams from this team setting. Simply click “Add Member” and choose the user you want to add from the dropdown. Then click Save.
You can remove a member from a specific team following the same steps.
5.3 Archiving Teams
Teams cannot be deleted to preserve conversation history. Instead, they can be Archived. When archiving, you must choose a different active team to receive the archived team's current conversations.
To archive a team, follow these steps:
Go to Settings from your profile avatar
Click on Teams from the General settigs menu
Click the Archive (red button) next to the team you want to archive
A pop up will appear to prompt you to reassign the conversations of this team to a different active team. Choose a team and confirm archiving.
This might create an overload of conversations assigned to the current active team and you should be ready to handle that as all conversations that were assigned to the archived team will be routed to the new team you chose.
You can un-archive a team: to restore a team follow these steps: Go to "Archived" tab from the teams section -> Click Un-archive icon.
This organization of users into teams is the prerequisite for the platform's intelligent rules that govern how conversations are assigned.
6. User's Personal Profile Settings
6.1 User profile set up and editing
Every user can customize their experience through their Profile page (accessed via Avatar > Profile).
Display Name: Users can update their first and last names. If "Show Employee Name" is enabled in Chatbot settings, this name is visible to customers.
Profile picture: Users can upload a profile picture.
Account Language: the Businesschat platform supports Arabic, English, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Security:
2FA: Two-Factor Authentication can be toggled ON to require a secondary verification code when logging in from new devices. The system remembers "Trusted Devices" for 30 days, so users aren't prompted for a secondary code every time they log in.
Personal WhatsApp Number: Used for receiving account alerts and OTPs; this is separate from the business line used for customer chats.
6.2 Changing a user's password
All users can update their passwords at any time for security reasons directly from their profiles.
Open your Profile.
Enter your Current Password in the designated field.
Enter your New Password and confirm it in the "Confirm New Password" field.
Click Save.