A few ideas explain almost everything Relay does. Read this once and the rest of the docs will feel obvious.
Visitors and customers#
Relay has no user accounts of its own. The first time someone opens the widget or the feedback board, their browser gets a random, anonymous visitor id kept in localStorage. That id is how Relay recognizes them when they come back.
When your app tells Relay who is signed in (their name, email, your user id, their plan), that visitor becomes a named customer in your inbox. You never have to ask “what’s your email?”. See Identify your users.
Conversations#
Every question becomes a conversation: a thread of messages from the customer, the bot, you, and your internal notes. It starts in the widget (chat) or from an email (email), and it always has exactly one status.
Statuses#
How a conversation moves#
Relay moves conversations for you based on what happens. You rarely need to change a status by hand.
When the bot is turned off, new conversations start as Open. Internal notes never change the status.
Priority and tags#
Each conversation also has a priority (low, normal, high, urgent) and any number of tags such as billing or bug. Tags feed the busiest-tags chart in Analytics.
The bot#
The bot answers first, from your published knowledge base articles, and always cites them. It hands off to you when it can’t answer or when a customer clearly wants a person (words like “refund”, “bug” or “talk to a human”). With AI answers on, it writes natural answers with Claude; with them off, it quotes the best-matching article. See How the bot answers.
Feedback posts#
On the feedback board, each idea is a post with a title, description, vote count, comments and a status. Each visitor gets one vote per post and can take it back. Only you can change a post’s status.
Workspace settings#
One Relay workspace serves one product. Your brand name, accent color, greeting, agent name and automation switches live in Inbox → Settings, and both components read them when they load. Change them there, with no code changes.