How it works

This page follows one message from a customer all the way through Callivox, so the rest of the documentation makes sense in context.

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1. A channel brings the message in

You connect a channel once — a WhatsApp number, a Facebook Page, a Telegram bot, a mailbox, or the chat widget on your website. From then on, everything a customer sends on that channel arrives in Callivox automatically. Chat channels are instant. Email is checked on a short cycle, so an email may take about a minute to appear. See Channels.

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2. Callivox finds or creates the conversation

Messages are grouped into conversations: one thread with one person on one channel. If that person has written before, the new message joins their existing conversation. If they are new, Callivox creates a contact for them and starts a fresh conversation.

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3. Routing decides where it lands

Routing rules can file a conversation into a folder, or assign it to a person or a team, based on things like the channel it came from or what the message says. Anything no rule claims sits in Unrouted, so nothing is quietly lost. See Folders and routing rules.

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4. An AI agent answers — or your team does

Each channel has an AI auto-reply switch:

• On — the AI agent bound to that channel reads the conversation and replies. It can look things up in a knowledge base, call a tool, and follow the behaviour you configured. When it hits something it should not handle, it hands over to a person.
• Off — your team answers. An assist agent can still work in the background, drafting suggested replies for the person on duty.

Phone calls work the same way, with a voice agent answering instead.

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5. Your team works the conversation

In the inbox, a conversation can be assigned, transferred to a team, tagged, answered with a canned response, and closed when it is done. Everything the AI did is visible in the same thread, so a person picking it up can see what was already said.

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6. Automations connect the rest of your business

An automation reacts to something that happened — a new conversation, a scheduled time, an incoming webhook — and does work in your other tools: create the CRM record, add the row to a spreadsheet, send the follow-up message.

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What it costs

Credits are spent when AI does work, not when messages move. A conversation answered by an AI agent costs a fixed number of credits for a 24-hour window, no matter how many messages are exchanged inside it. Human replies and incoming messages cost nothing. How credits are spent explains this in full.