Every customer conversation starts somewhere: a WhatsApp number, your website chat, a Facebook page, an Instagram account, an email address. In HellouOne, each of those entry points is an inbox, and how you create and manage inboxes decides who answers, when, and who answers first. This post explains the inbox model as our help guide describes it: what an inbox is, the five step wizard that creates one, what the inbox decides and what it does not, and what happens when you delete one. It is based on our help guide: Inboxes, create and manage your channels (https://help.hellou.ai/hc/hellou/articles/1791215206-bandejas-de-entrada-crear-y-gestionar-tus-canales).
What an inbox is
An inbox is a channel through which customers write to you: a chat widget on your website, a WhatsApp number, a Facebook page, an Instagram account, a Telegram bot, an email, an SMS number, or the API for your own integrations. Each inbox has its own collaborators, its own business hours, and its own AI agent.
That per inbox design is the point. Your WhatsApp sales number and your support email do not need the same people, the same hours, or the same AI agent answering first. Keeping those choices at inbox level lets one account run several very different customer entry points without mixing them up.
Where inboxes are managed
In Settings, Inboxes (shown as Entradas in the Spanish interface) you see all the inboxes of the account. From each one you can open its settings with the gear icon, or delete it. Only administrators can create, change, or delete inboxes. That restriction matters because an inbox is not a cosmetic setting: creating or deleting one connects or disconnects a real customer channel.
For an admin, this list is the map of how customers can reach the business. If a channel is missing from the list, customers writing there are not arriving in HellouOne. If a channel on the list is no longer used, it is still a door customers may knock on. Reviewing the list is a simple periodic habit for any team that adds channels over time.
Create an inbox: the five step wizard
Click Add inbox and follow the five step wizard. First, Choose channel: Website, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, SMS, Email, API, Telegram, or Line. Second, Create inbox: the data of the channel. For WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, the connection with Meta opens; for the website, you only provide a name and the domain.
Third, Add agents: who receives the conversations of this inbox. You can change this later in the Collaborators tab. Fourth, Connect an AI agent: this step is optional, and you choose which of your AI agents answers first in this inbox. Fifth, Voila: for a website, this is where you get the code you paste into your page.
Each channel has its own guide in the help center, including WhatsApp Cloud, Facebook and Instagram, and the website widget, so the channel specific connection steps live with the channel, while the wizard gives every new inbox the same five step shape. A new team member who has created one inbox already knows the shape of creating the next one, whatever the channel.
What the inbox decides, and what it does not
The guide draws a clear line. Who attends is decided by the inbox: its collaborators. A person who is not a collaborator does not receive conversations from that channel. When is decided by the inbox too: its business hours and its out of hours message. Who answers first is also the inbox: the AI agent connected to it, if there is one.
How conversations are shared out among the collaborators is not decided by the inbox. That distribution is decided in Settings, Assignment, for the whole account. Keeping that rule in one account level place is what makes distribution consistent across channels: the same assignment logic applies whether a conversation arrived by WhatsApp, email, or web chat, while each inbox still controls who is in its pool, its hours, and its AI first responder.
For a manager, that split answers most routing questions quickly. If the wrong people are receiving a channel, check the inbox collaborators. If conversations are distributed unevenly, check account Assignment. If customers write at night and get silence, check the inbox hours and out of hours message. If an AI agent answers where a person should go first, check the AI agent connected to that inbox.
Deleting an inbox: export first
Deleting an inbox deserves care. When you delete it, its conversations disappear and the channel is disconnected. If it is a WhatsApp number or a Meta page, you can reconnect them in a new inbox, but the history does not come back. The guide advice is direct: export first what you need, from Reports.
That makes deletion a deliberate closing act, not a cleanup click. Before deleting, confirm the channel is truly retired, export the history your team may need for records or reporting, and only then delete. Reconnecting the channel later is possible in the WhatsApp and Meta cases, but a new inbox starts with a new history.
Done well, inbox management is quiet infrastructure. Customers write through the channels they prefer, each channel reaches the right collaborators during the right hours, an AI agent answers first where you want it to, and distribution follows one account rule. The five step wizard is how each new door gets added to that system, with the same care as the doors already open.
Source: Hellou help center, Inboxes, create and manage your channels: https://help.hellou.ai/hc/hellou/articles/1791215206-bandejas-de-entrada-crear-y-gestionar-tus-canales
