Clearline Key Concepts

Clearline has a small set of concepts that connect everything else. If you understand these nine, you can navigate the rest of the documentation, configure Clearline confidently, and reason about what happens to a customer message from the moment it arrives to the moment it’s resolved. Read top-to-bottom. Each concept builds on the ones before it.

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1. Workspace

A workspace is the top-level container for your company. It holds your team, communication channels, customer records, automations, and scheduling configuration. Workspace settings define the defaults everything else inherits: timezone, date and time formatting, business hours, location, and shared agent behavior. Workspace admins manage members and roles, shared phone numbers and email domains, the data model, inboxes, appointment types, compliance rules, knowledge base entries, and agent skills. Workspace settings →

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2. Members and personal channels

A member is a person on your team. Each member has a profile name and email, notification preferences, and inbox memberships for the shared queues they work. Members can also connect personal channels: a Google or Microsoft account for email and calendar sync, and a personal Clearline phone number for SMS and voice. Once connected, those channels become the member’s personal inbox. Connected channels →

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3. Channels

A channel is a communication asset Clearline can use to send and receive messages. Channels are where conversations come from. Once a channel is attached to an inbox, your team works the conversation without thinking about origin, and replies post back to the channel it came from. Set up channels →

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4. Inboxes

An inbox is a conversation queue. Inboxes can be personal or shared. A shared inbox can have phone numbers, email addresses, members, routing rules, a web chat widget, and an AI agent mode. A personal inbox is tied to a single member and is managed through their connected channels. Inboxes are the destination every channel routes into. Create your first inbox →

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5. Conversations

A conversation collects the message history with a customer across SMS, email, calls, and web chat. It has a status, a source, contacts, team participants, an assignment, and a message thread. How the AI agent participates depends on the inbox agent mode:

• Manual: your team replies.
• Copilot: the agent assists, but your team stays in control.
• Autopilot: the agent can respond automatically within configured routing and availability rules.

Agent modes →

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6. Contacts and the data model

A contact stores everything you know about a customer: their information, communication history, meetings, tasks, opportunities, AI summaries, and custom fields. The data model controls which custom fields exist across Clearline, for contacts, opportunities, tasks, schedules, appointment questions, and web chat gate questions. It’s how you shape Clearline around the data your team actually tracks. CRM and contacts →

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7. Opportunities and tasks

An opportunity tracks a piece of sales or service pipeline work. Opportunity stages are configured from Settings → Opportunity stages and can be viewed in table or board views. A task tracks follow-up work. Tasks can be assigned to workspace users, linked to contacts or opportunities, and filtered by custom fields. Opportunities →

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8. Appointments

An appointment type defines a bookable service. Each type controls its duration, advisors, routing, availability, booking questions, scheduler integrations, notification channels, reminders, and booking policy. Together they answer the question: what can a customer book, with whom, and when? Appointments overview →

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9. Outbound campaigns

An outbound campaign reaches customers proactively using AI-generated sequences across email, SMS, and calls. Each campaign has a goal, selected outreach methods, a sequence length, senders, recipients, and an enrollment state. Campaigns are how you turn a list of contacts into consistent, multi-step follow-up without manual work. Outbound campaigns overview → Ready to set things up? Continue to the Quickstart for a path from sign-up to live, or jump straight into Channels if you already know what you want to connect first.