💬 Chatavise Lesson: Mastering the Chats Page

In this lesson, we’re diving into one of the most essential areas of the Chatavise mobile app: the Chats page. To make things simple and clear, we’ve broken this down into two parts:

1. Inbox Filtering
2. Text Functionality

Let’s get started!

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🗂 Part 1: Inbox Filtering

When you open the Chatavise app, the Chats page is the very first screen you’ll see. At the top, you’ll find your most recent conversations, with older ones further down as you scroll.

🔍 Filter Options

Along the top, you’ll see four filtering buttons:

1. Unread Messages
   • Tap to filter only unread threads
   • Tap again to turn the filter off
2. Full Message History
   • Shows all messages, including those older than 30 days
   • Helpful for searching deeper, but may slightly slow down performance on high-volume accounts
   • For most small businesses, this won’t be an issue
3. Assigned to Me
   • Filters to only show conversations assigned to you
4. Failed Messages
   • Displays any undelivered or failed texts

🔁 You can use multiple filters at once. If something looks off, try toggling one or more off to troubleshoot.

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📇 Search and Advanced Filtering

• Use the search bar at the top to find contacts by name or phone number
• Tap the funnel icon to apply advanced filters:
  • Tags
  • Locations
  • Users

Example:
Filter by tag (e.g., Health & Wellness Expo) to focus your inbox on contacts from that event—perfect for targeted follow-ups.

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💬 Part 2: Text Functionality

Tap on a conversation to enter the text thread.

⚠️ Known issue: For long threads, the app may not scroll to the latest message. Tap the scroll-down button once or twice to quickly jump to the most recent message.

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🧭 Navigation Buttons Inside a Chat

Across the top of a text thread, you’ll find four key icons:

1. Mark as Read/Unread
   • Tap to toggle the read status of the conversation
2. Phone Icon
   • Initiates a call to the contact using your Chatavise business number
   • Ignore the “arbitrary number” shown—it’s just a placeholder
3. Three Dots (⋮)
   • Tap to Remove Contact
   • This hides the thread and prevents outbound texts, but inbound messages are still captured (you can search for them by name/number)
4. Info Icon (ℹ️)
   • Opens a quick guide to the buttons on this page

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📝 Messaging Features

• Tap the text field to type a message
• Tap send icon to send it immediately
• Tap the plus (+) icon to:
  • Use Ask Kelly (AI assistant)
  • Insert a message template
  • Add message variables
  • Attach an image (camera or gallery)
  • Schedule a text for later

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📋 Other Tabs Inside a Contact Thread

Along the bottom of the screen, you’ll find five tabs:

1. Profile

Edit contact details:

• Name
• Phone number
• Email
• Company
• Address (and more fields coming soon)

2. Notes

• Tap the blue plus icon to add a note
  Example: “LMS Example 2”
• Tap the edit icon to modify notes
  Example: “Let’s win.”

3. Tags

• View all tags assigned to the contact
• Toggle off to remove a tag
• Search & add existing tags
• Create new tags (e.g., LMS Example 6) by typing and tapping the plus (+) to attach

This mirrors the process taught in the Tags lesson.

4. Files

• View images shared in the chat
• Upload:
  • Business cards
  • Contact selfies
  • Job photos (for service businesses)

5. Team

• Assign team members to the contact
• Assigned users receive push and/or email notifications for new messages

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✅ Summary

By now, you should feel confident in:

• Filtering your inbox using tools like unread messages, tags, and assignments
• Navigating and managing one-on-one chats
• Sending messages, using templates, adding images, and scheduling
• Viewing and updating contact profiles, notes, tags, and files
• Assigning teammates for better communication flow

💡 The key to mastering Chatavise is active use—start moving all your messaging into the platform, including sales, marketing, and operational conversations.

Our most successful users often say they can’t imagine going back to apps like iMessage or Android texting. What they had in common? Commitment to the switch.

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See you in the next lesson!

In this lesson, we’re going to cover the fundamentals of the Chats page. To do this, we’re going to break up this lesson into two parts: inbox filtering and text functionality. So let’s get started.

The Chats page is the first screen you see when you open up the Chatavise mobile app. So let’s take a look. At the top, here we can see the most recent conversations, and the further we scroll, the older the text message conversations get. We can use these options over here to filter our inbox. The first filter option will show us unread text messages, and if I click on it again, it will remove that filter. The second filter option will show my account’s entire text message history, and depending on your message volume, you may want to leave it off unless you need to see messages older than 30 days because it will help with your inbox load speed. I’d say this: for most small businesses, you won’t really notice a difference, but I’m going to turn it off.

The third filter option—this one here—will only show the text threads from contacts that are assigned to me (or you, because it’s your Chats). Lastly, the last filter option here will show undelivered/failed text messages. As you can see, none display here because I have two filter options selected at the same time. So I’m going to unselect the one that shows your Chats.

Here we can see that we have one failed text message that didn’t go through. And I’m going to turn off that filter option as well. We are back to where we started. Now at the top, we can search for specific contacts using the name or phone number. But we also have a funnel icon to the right of that. Let’s go ahead and click on that. Here we can see additional filter options. I use the Tags one a lot, but there’s Tags, Locations, and Users. Those are the three that we recommend that you use.

The Tags filter option will allow you to sort through tags like so. You can also find the specific tag by typing it here. So I’m going to look for people that I met at this expo, and when I click there and hit Apply, it will sort my inbox and filter it only to show the people that are tagged that way. This makes it easy to concentrate on a specific group of contacts that you want to focus on.

For this part of the lesson, let’s click on a specific text thread.

Now, this is a known issue that our development team is working on. When there’s a long history of text going back and forth with a contact, Chatavise doesn’t always take you to the last text message. You can get there by scrolling down like so, but I want to share with you a workaround that will get you there a little faster. If you click on this button here, it will take you further down the screen, sometimes all the way to the end. If you click on it again, it will take you to the last message.

Now that the workaround is out of the way, let’s focus our attention on these four buttons over here. If we click on this button again, it will mark it as unread. If we click on it again, it will mark this conversation as read. If we click on the phone call button, it will initiate a phone call to that contact. When you click on the green button, you’ll see an arbitrary number here—that doesn’t mean anything. When you make a phone call to this contact, they will see your Chatavise business number show up on their caller ID.

The button to the right of the phone call—the three vertical dot button—will show a menu with “Remove Contact” as the only option there. When you click on this, it will remove this text message thread from appearing in your inbox unless you search for it specifically by name or phone number. It will also stop outbound text messages from being sent out to this contact. And if this contact sends you a text message, Chatavise will still capture the inbound text message. But to retrieve it, you’ll need to search for it by their name or phone number.

Now the next button to the right of that is the Info button. If you click on that, you’ll see a quick little information screen on the different buttons on this page. And to exit it, you can press the X.

Now let’s move our attention to the “Type your message” field. When you click there, you can write your message—”Hello” as an example. The button to the right of that will send the message out right away, like so.

And you can see the message is being sent out. The button to the right of that will show a menu showing our AI (Ask Kelly), your templates, the Use Message Variables menu, as well as the ability to attach images using your camera or your gallery. You can also schedule a text message to be sent out later, like so.

Now below those options, we see Chats. Chats is highlighted because we’re currently on the Chats page. If we click “Profile,” we can see how we can edit the name of the contact, the phone number, the email, the company, address, and we’ll be adding other fields to this Profile screen.

If you click on “Notes,” you can add a new note by pressing this blue plus sign here and add a note like I’m going to do here—”LMS Example 2″—and I can edit that note by clicking on the edit button there and say “let’s win,” update. So you can update the notes there as well.

On the button to the right of Notes—Tags—we can see how this contact is currently tagged. We can remove tags from the contact by hitting the toggle like so. We can add a tag by searching for it like this and adding it, and you can now see that there are three tags. Again, we can also create a tag and attach it. So if I’m going to put “LMS Example 6,” we’ll see a plus sign appear there because there are no tags with that exact name. So if I hit the plus sign, it creates the tag and I can attach it like so. We reviewed this in the Tags lesson in this course.

To the right of Tags, we can click on “Files.” Here we can view images that they are sending to us. But we can also take our own picture or upload an image using our gallery. Now, a lot of our clients use this to take a picture of a business card—like I did here as an example. Some people use it to take a selfie of the contact so that it appends it to the contact and now they have a name and a face to go with it. Some people also, especially in the service industry, use it to take pictures of the job, and it’ll append it to that contact.

Now to the right of that, if we click on “Team,” we can assign users to the contact. And so when this contact sends us a text message, the users that are assigned to the contact will get notified via push notification and/or email notification.

You now know how to filter your inbox using several filter options, including tags. You also have a great foundational understanding of how to use the one-on-one text functionality in the Chatavise mobile app. The key to getting comfortable using all of these features is to start texting contacts as soon as your Chatavise account has been approved. It brings my team and me great joy when users tell us that they can’t imagine going back to using a consumer app like iMessage or Android texting to handle their business texting needs.

But they all have one thing in common: they were dedicated to moving over all of their text message-based conversations over to their Chatavise account. That includes for sales, marketing, and operational communication needs.

With that said, I’ll see you in the next lesson.