Smart Inbox and guest profiles.
Inbound guest conversations in one queue, triaged and drafted by GEX, with a person on the send button — and the profile that remembers the rest.
One queue
Every inbound guest conversation arrives in Smart Inbox, rather than in three inboxes, a phone nobody is currently holding, and a personal account belonging to whoever worked last night. The unit is the conversation, not the message: the thread stays whole, so the person picking it up at 23:40 can read what was already said instead of asking the guest to repeat it.
The queue is scoped to the property, and routed to a department. A supervisor sees what their department owns and what is waiting.
Triage
For each conversation GEX establishes four things in one pass:
- Intent — what the guest is actually asking for, which is often not the first sentence.
- Sentiment — how they sound, which decides how quickly a person needs to be involved.
- Guest — whether the sender matches a guest profile and a current reservation.
- Department — who should answer.
Routing follows from that. Any of it can be overridden by the person handling the conversation, and the override is recorded in the activity log along with everything else, so a misroute is a thing you can go and look at rather than a thing people complain about in general.
The draft, and the person who sends it
- 01/05Arrives
The conversation lands in the queue, timestamped, attached to a guest profile where one matches.
- 02/05Classified
Intent, sentiment, guest and department are established, and the conversation is routed.
- 03/05Drafted
GEX writes a reply from what the profile and the department's knowledge base actually say. Where the answer came from a procedure, the procedure is cited on the draft.
- 04/05Reviewed
A person reads it, edits it, rewrites it, or discards it. Then they send. The send is a human action.
- 05/05Recorded
The conversation, the draft, the edit and the send are all on the record, at that property, under that person's name.
A reply to a guest is drafted, not sent. Nothing reaches a guest because an agent decided it should. If a draft is wrong, the cost is ten seconds of reading — which is the trade the whole design is built around.
What a draft is allowed to say
- What is in the conversation itself and on the guest profile.
- What the department's knowledge base says, with the procedure cited.
- Nothing else. If the answer is not written down anywhere, the draft says so rather than inventing a plausible one, and the gap is worth a procedure.
That constraint is why the knowledge base and the inbox are the same project. A property with thin procedures gets thin drafts, and the fix is not a better model — it is writing the standard down.
Escalation
Some conversations should not be answered by a draft at all. A complaint, a safety issue, anything about money, anything where the guest is plainly upset. These are raised rather than drafted: an urgent task to the department that owns it, with the thread attached, so the person who picks it up has read the whole exchange before they reply.
Guest profiles
A profile is what the property knows about a person, in one place, across every property in the workspace.
Name, contact details and the language they wrote to you in — so the reply goes back in the language the question arrived in.
Past stays, requests, orders and conversations, including the ones that happened at a different property in the group.
High floor, late check-out, no nuts at breakfast. Written once by whoever learned it, rather than rediscovered every stay.
Notes a flow attached: anniversary, positive, open to an upgrade. Visible as what they are — machine-added context a person can correct.
Worked through: Sarah Klein (sarah.klein@example.invalid) messages Marina Bay
Hotel at 23:40. GEX matches her to a current reservation, reads the intent as a
late-arrival request, and drafts a reply citing the front-desk procedure for
arrivals after midnight. Karim R., on the night desk, reads the draft, adds the
one line about the side entrance that is not in the procedure, and sends. The
missing line becomes a task on front desk to update the procedure, so the next
person does not have to know it.
Storefronts and orders, briefly
Where a guest orders something rather than asking about it — an airport transfer, an arrival grocery pack — it becomes an order, and the order splits into work for the departments that fulfil each part. The conversation, the order and the resulting tasks stay attached to the same guest profile, which is what makes the next stay easier than the last one.
Where to go next
- Knowledge bases — what a draft is allowed to cite.
- Flows — the guest-facing templates, read end to end.
- Core concepts — where the approval line sits, in general.