Conversations: Your Unified Inbox

The Conversations inbox is where every message your practice sends and receives lives in one place. Whether a patient texts your office number, replies to an email, or leaves a voicemail, it all shows up here so nothing falls through the cracks between channels or staff members.

What Lands in the Inbox

Dental Marketing Tool pulls together every patient-facing channel into a single feed:

• Text messages sent to your practice phone number
• Emails exchanged through the platform
• Missed call notifications and any automatic text-back replies
• Facebook Messenger messages from your connected Facebook page
• Instagram direct messages if your Instagram is linked
• Web chat messages from the chat widget on your website

Every one of these appears as a conversation thread tied to the patient's contact record, so you can see the full history of how your office has communicated with that person in one scrollable view.

Reading and Opening Conversations

To open the inbox, click Conversations in the left-side menu. You will see a list of recent threads on the left and the selected conversation on the right.

• Unread threads are shown in bold with a colored dot. Once you open the thread, it is automatically marked as read.
• The channel icon next to each thread (a speech bubble for SMS, an envelope for email, and so on) tells you at a glance where the latest message came from.
• Clicking a thread loads the full conversation history on the right side, with the most recent messages at the bottom.

You can reply directly from within the thread. Use the channel selector at the bottom of the reply box to pick whether you want to respond by text or email. For more detail on sending a reply, see Sending and Replying to Text Messages and Emailing Patients from the Inbox.

Staying on Top of Your Inbox

A busy practice needs a consistent routine for checking the inbox. Here are a few habits that work well for most front desks:

• Assign someone as the primary inbox owner for each shift. When one person is responsible, messages are less likely to go unanswered.
• Use the Unread filter at the top of the conversation list to zero in on anything that still needs a response.
• Star conversations you need to come back to, and archive threads once they are fully resolved to keep the inbox tidy. Learn more in Marking Read, Starring, and Archiving.
• If your practice has multiple team members, you can assign a conversation to a specific person so it is clear who is following up. See Assigning Conversations to Your Team for the steps.

The Patient Record Behind Every Thread

Every conversation is connected to a contact record in the platform. From within a thread, you can click the patient's name at the top of the conversation panel to open their full record, where you will see past appointments, tags, notes, and more. This makes it easy to pull up context before you respond, without switching between tools.

What the Inbox Is Not Meant For

The Conversations inbox handles one-on-one patient communication. It is not where you send mass messages to your full patient list. For that, head to the Marketing section of the dashboard, where you can build and schedule text campaigns and email campaigns separately.

Keeping Things Organized

As message volume grows, the inbox filters and tab views become your best friend. You can filter by channel, status (open, read, unread), or assigned team member to quickly focus on what matters. Head to Filters, Tabs, and Managing Unread to learn how to work faster with those tools.

Once you are comfortable with the inbox, a good next step is setting up Missed Call Text-Back so patients who cannot reach you by phone still get an immediate response. You may also want to build out a library of Quick Replies for the questions your front desk answers most often.