What is a Conversation?
A conversation is a thread of communication between your lab and a customer. It lives inside the Inbox system and collects all messages, attachments, and internal notes related to a single topic or request. Every conversation has a title, a status (open or closed), and can optionally be linked to a customer, billing account, specific cases, an inbox, and an assigned user.
Conversations can originate from several places: a customer sending an email, a customer using the portal messenger, or a lab user manually creating one. Regardless of how it started, once it's in the system, all follow-up communication happens in the same thread.
Creating a Conversation: Start vs Log
When you click the + button to create a new conversation, you'll see two modes at the top: Start and Log.
Start a conversation means you are initiating new outbound communication. You compose an email (with To, CC, BCC recipients, subject, and body), and when you click Send, the email is delivered to the recipients immediately. A new conversation is created and the email appears as the first message. This is for reaching out to a customer proactively — for example, to ask a question about a case or follow up on a pending issue.
Log a conversation means you are recording a communication that already happened outside of Pilot. For example, a customer called you on the phone, or you had an SMS exchange, or an email conversation happened in your personal inbox. You select the source type (Email, Call, WhatsApp, SMS, or Other), fill in the relevant details (phone numbers for calls/SMS, or email details for emails), and write notes about what was discussed. The initial log entry is saved as a record, but no email is sent to the customer. If you or someone on your team later replies to this conversation from within Pilot, that reply will be sent as an email to the contacts on the conversation.
When logging, you can also mark the conversation as "finished" — this saves it as a closed conversation, useful for record-keeping when no follow-up is needed.
Email Threading
When a lab user replies to a conversation, Pilot sends the reply as an email to the conversation's contacts. Pilot includes standard email threading headers (In-Reply-To and References) so that the customer's email client (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) groups the reply into the same email thread as the original message.
Note on email clients:
Different email clients have different behavior when it comes to email threading. It's important that you maintain the health of your domain to ensure email deliverability.
For conversations that started via email (a customer emailed your lab), replies are threaded into the customer's existing email thread. The customer sees a continuous back-and-forth conversation in their inbox, just like any normal email exchange.
For conversations that started via the portal messenger or were logged manually, the first reply from a lab user is the first email the customer receives. Subsequent replies will include conversation history at the bottom of the email so the customer has context, since they don't have a prior email thread to reference.
Messenger vs Email Conversations
Conversations can start from two main channels, and each behaves slightly differently.
Portal messenger conversations are started by a customer through the chat widget on the customer portal. When the customer sends a message, a new conversation is created in Pilot. Lab users can reply from the Inbox, and their reply is delivered in two ways: it appears in the customer's messenger widget in real-time, and it is also sent as an email to the customer's email address. The email includes the full conversation history, so the customer has context even if they read the reply from their inbox instead of the portal.
Email conversations are created when a customer sends an email to your lab's email address. The email is automatically routed into Pilot, and a new conversation is created with the email content as the first message. When a lab user replies, the reply is sent as an email that threads into the customer's original email thread. No conversation history is appended to the email body, because the customer's email client already has the full thread context.
Selecting Customer, Billing Account, and Linking Cases
When creating a conversation (either starting or logging), you can associate it with:
Customer — this links the conversation to that customer's record and makes it visible to any portal users associated with that customer.
Billing Account — the billing account associated with this conversation. All customer portal users that are associated with this billing account will see this conversation.
Cases — you can link one or more cases to the conversation. This creates a direct connection between the communication and the specific lab work being discussed. Linked cases appear as "pills" in the conversation, and you can click them to navigate to the case. You can also start a conversation directly from a case page, which automatically links that case and locks the customer/billing account fields.
Automatic Customer Resolution
When a customer sends an email to your lab, Pilot automatically tries to match the sender to an existing customer in your system. It does this by comparing the sender's email address against the email addresses stored on your customer records. If a match is found, the conversation is automatically linked to that customer — no manual assignment needed.
If the sender cannot be matched to an existing customer, the conversation is still created but without a customer link. A lab user can manually assign the customer later from the conversation detail panel.
For portal messenger conversations, the customer is automatically resolved through the portal user's account, which is already linked to one or more customers.
Open and Closed Conversations
Every conversation is either open or closed.
New conversations start as open. An open conversation appears in active views (Your Inbox, All, Unassigned, and inbox-specific views) and signals that the issue is still being worked on or awaiting a response.
When the issue is resolved, you can close the conversation by clicking the close button in the conversation header. Closed conversations are hidden from default views but can still be found by filtering for closed status in the All view or searching by title/case number.
If a customer follows up on a closed conversation — either by sending another email in the thread or messaging through the portal — the conversation does not automatically reopen. A lab user can manually reopen it if further action is needed.
Messages vs Comments
Within a conversation, there are two distinct types of content: messages and comments.
Messages are the external communication between your lab and the customer. When a lab user writes a message, it is sent as an email to the conversation's contacts (and/or displayed in the customer's portal messenger). When a customer replies by email or messenger, their response appears as a message. Messages are visible to both lab users and the customer. Think of messages as the "external" channel — anything written here will be seen by the customer.
Comments are internal notes visible only to lab users. They are never sent to the customer and do not appear in the portal messenger. Use comments to discuss the conversation internally — for example, to ask a colleague for input, note important context, or document a decision. You can tag other lab users in comments using @mentions, which will surface the conversation in the mentioned user's "Mentions" view. Comments also support file attachments for sharing internal documents.
The conversation detail panel has separate tabs for the message thread and the comments thread, so there's a clear separation between customer-facing communication and internal discussion.