Follow-ups

Follow-ups is for everything that needs a person but is not a sales inquiry.

A letter from the bank. A supplier chasing a document. A compliance notice. A renewal. A form somebody has to fill in. None of those are leads and none are complaints, but every one of them needs a name against it, and in a shared mailbox they get forgotten in exactly the same way leads do.

The simple version

Every email that reaches your business is one of three things:

• a lead, which has a sales journey and ends in Won or Lost
• a follow-up, which is anything else that needs a person to act and finish
• noise, which is filtered away

Leads live on the Leads board. Follow-ups live here. Both have an owner, so nothing sits unclaimed.

How things get here

Automatically. When InboxAgent is confident an email is a service or support request, it appears here on its own, with the original email attached. Anything it is unsure about stays in Manual review instead, exactly as before.

Because you moved it. This is the useful one. Open any email in Inbox activity and use Move to Follow-ups. That bank email becomes an owned piece of work in one click. Moving the same email twice is harmless: it just takes you to the one that already exists.

Because you added it. Use New follow-up for something that arrived by phone or in person, with no email behind it.

What lands here, beyond service requests

Service and support requests always come here on their own. That is what the board is for, and it needs no setting.

Everything else is your choice. Admins get a What lands here button to add more: invoices and statements, automated notices and renewals, partnership approaches, job applications, legal and regulatory notices, and anything that did not fit a category.

Those would otherwise be filed away quietly. Ticking one means InboxAgent puts it here for a person instead, and Inbox activity reports it as handled rather than filed. It is off until you turn it on, so nothing changes on its own.

Two things it will not do. Sales inquiries always go to Leads, never here.

And anything InboxAgent was unsure about still waits in Manual review, whatever you have ticked. If you choose to receive invoices here, that applies to the invoices we recognized confidently. One we were not sure about still stops for a person first. Uncertainty always wins.

Working the board

Two states, and that is on purpose: Open or Done. There are no priorities to set, no deadlines to configure and no workflow to design. Give it an owner, add notes as you go, and mark it done when it is finished. You can reopen anything you closed too soon.

The board opens on Open, because that is the only view that is a to-do list.

About marking things done

You mark a follow-up as done. InboxAgent does not do it for you when somebody replies.

We would like to, and it is worth saying plainly why we do not claim it. We can only see what is in the mailbox we read. A Microsoft 365 shared mailbox only keeps a copy of sent messages when your administrator has turned that on, and a reply somebody sends from their own mailbox never touches the shared one at all. So a rule like “close it when a reply goes out” would be right sometimes and quietly wrong the rest of the time, which is worse than not having it.

Removing one

Admins can delete a follow-up from its panel. Its notes go with it and it cannot be undone.

That is deliberately not the same as marking it done. Done means the work happened and the record should stay, which is almost always what you want. Delete is for something that should never have been on the board: an email moved here by mistake, or a contact who has asked to be erased.

What this is not

It is not a helpdesk. There are no ticket numbers, no service-level targets, no canned replies and no portal for your customers. Nobody outside your workspace ever sees this board. It is internal oversight so that things stop falling through the cracks.

InboxAgent also never sends email on your behalf. Replying is still something you do in your own mailbox.

Who sees what

Everyone in your workspace can see the board, and users are free. Admins and Members can change things; Viewers can look but not edit, as everywhere else.

If an admin has limited somebody to certain mailboxes, they only see follow-ups from those mailboxes. Ones added by hand have no mailbox, so everybody sees them.

See also: Working your leads, Inbox activity.