Visibility in Aloware controls two separate things:
Line access decides which phone lines an agent can use. It follows inbox membership.
Communication access decides which contacts and conversations an agent can see. It follows a per-user visibility setting.
The sections below set both up from start to finish, and explain each setting at the point where you configure it. To keep it concrete, we will follow one company through the whole setup.
Sample configuration: Two sales teams sharing one IVR line
Say you run a sales organization with two teams. The East team and the West team each have their own phone lines and handle their own customers.
A shared main line greets every caller with an IVR and routes them to whichever team is available. Your team leads also need to keep an eye on both inboxes and jump in to reply when someone is out, without having that team's calls and texts start ringing on their own phones.
That leaves three things to get right:
Each team should see only its own lines and customers.
The shared IVR should still reach the right people.
Managers should be able to cover an inbox without being pulled into its routing.
Creating an inbox for each team
In Aloware admin, create an East sales inbox and a West sales inbox, then connect each team's phone lines to its own inbox.
To assign a line in the inbox, go to Lines menu, select the line you want to add to the inbox, click settings.
In Routing & IVR, select An Inbox and select the inbox (example: East inbox).
Line assigned to an inbox in admin
Line visibility follows inbox membership. An agent sees every line assigned to the inboxes they belong to, and there is no separate per-user line visibility setting to configure.
Connecting a line to an inbox is what makes that line available to the inbox's members.
To learn more, see Lines menu: Routing and IVR settings.
Granting line access through inbox membership
Add the East agents to the East inbox and the West agents to the West inbox.
Access follows this membership.
To grant an agent a line later, add them to an inbox the line is connected to. To remove access, remove them from the inbox.
Line access updates as soon as membership changes, so no per-user line configuration is needed.
To learn more, see How visibility works in Aloware Talk.
Setting a fallback inbox for the shared IVR
Open the main IVR line and set its fallback inbox, for example a shared Front Desk inbox that both team leads belong to.
Every IVR and dead-end line requires a fallback inbox, and you cannot save one without it.
The fallback inbox does two things: it gives communications that reach an IVR or dead end a valid destination, and it determines which agents can see the line. Only members of the fallback inbox see the IVR or dead-end line.
When you set the default fallback inbox for an inbox, the line selector lists only the IVR and dead-end lines that belong to that inbox, not every line in the company.
To learn more, see Fallback inboxes for IVR and dead-end lines in Aloware.
Choosing what each agent sees on global pages
On the Visibility tab of each user's settings, choose how much that agent sees on the global Communications and Contacts pages.
The Communications setting has three options:
Everything shows all contacts and communications across the company. Use it for agents who need a company-wide view.
Owned only shows only the contacts and communications assigned to that agent.
Inherit from inboxes shows only the contacts and communications tied to the inboxes the agent belongs to. Use it to keep East and West agents scoped to their own team's work.
The Context setting keeps its existing Everything and Owned only options and is unchanged. These settings apply only to global views.
Inside an inbox, inbox rules always decide what an agent sees, regardless of the Communications or Context setting, so an agent working in an inbox sees everything assigned to it.
To learn more, see Lines menu: Visibility settings.
Configuring default outbound lines and caller ID
Set each agent's default outbound line so their calls and texts go out on the right number. Caller ID follows the selected line, since the caller ID is determined by the line.
When you set an agent's default line using Manual Select, the dropdown lists every company line. Lines the agent cannot access stay visible but appear disabled, so it is clear the line exists even though the agent cannot use it.
If an agent later loses access to their selected or default line, the selector clears and opens empty, and the agent picks another line they can access. There is no warning or blocked state.
Line selectors are scoped by where the agent opens them:
The Direct Dialer, opened outside any inbox, shows all lines across the agent's accessible inboxes.
The Line Selector inside an inbox shows only that inbox's lines.
The All Inboxes view shows all lines across the agent's accessible inboxes.
The company-level Force Outbound Line by Line setting applies only outside the inbox context, such as in the Direct Dialer.
Inside an inbox, inbox scoping always takes precedence.
Covering inboxes with watchers
To let a team lead cover the other team's inbox when someone is out, add them as a watcher on that inbox instead of as a connected member.
A watcher monitors the inbox without becoming a routing endpoint for it, so that team's calls and texts are not routed to them.
Watchers can still reply from the inbox, which is what makes them useful for covering a colleague who is out without joining the inbox as a full member.
How admin access and shared local presence work
Two things sit outside the per-agent setup above.
Admin access stays full at all times. Admins see all lines, contacts, communications, and settings, and visibility settings do not restrict admin accounts. The visibility settings screen shows a warning noting this, so a setting that appears to have no effect on an admin account is behaving as expected.
Shared local presence has its own control. If several agents share the same phone line and you need each one scoped to only their own contacts and conversations, turn on the company-level Force Inbox to Respect Agent Visibility Limits setting. It controls communication visibility for shared local presence and does not change which phone lines an agent can access.
