The Conversation Sidebar
A tour of the right-hand panel — where to find context without asking the customer
When you open a conversation, the right-hand panel shows everything Octocom knows about the customer and the situation. The point is simple: most of the time you don't need to ask the customer for information that's already on the screen. This page is a tour of what you'll find there.
The sections shown depend on what's connected for your business — not every workspace will see every section.
Customer
The customer's profile: name, email, phone, language, location, and any customer tags. If the same customer has written in before, they're identified here so you can see their history at a glance.
Other conversations
A list of the customer's previous conversations with you. Useful for spotting repeat issues, ongoing complaints, or conversations that should be merged.
Orders
If your store is connected (Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, or a custom integration), the customer's recent orders are shown here. You can see order status, line items, fulfillment, and tracking without leaving the conversation. When the customer references "my order," it's usually right here.
Returns
Active and past returns for the customer's orders, including status and reason. Lets you answer "where's my refund?" without context-switching.
Subscriptions
If the customer is on a subscription, their plan, status, next billing date, and history are shown here.
Gift cards
Gift cards owned by or associated with the customer.
Priority
Set the priority of the conversation: No priority, Low, Medium, or High. Priority is filterable in views and useful for surfacing urgent work to the top of a queue.
Tags
Conversation tags applied to this specific conversation. Tags are how you classify conversations for views, reporting, and routing. (See the Tags & Priority page.)
Topics
Octocom auto-detects the topic of the conversation (e.g. "shipping", "refund request", "product question"). Topics are filterable in views and surface in analytics so you can see what your customers actually ask about.
Sentiment
Auto-detected customer sentiment, ranging from Strongly Negative to Strongly Positive, along with a sentiment reason explaining why. Use this to spot unhappy customers early.
Data collection
If a data collection flow ran (asking the customer for an order ID, email, photos, etc.), the collected fields are shown here so you don't have to scroll back through the chat to find them.
Email thread
For email conversations, shows the underlying email thread structure — useful when a thread spans multiple messages with different recipients or CCs.
Session
For chat conversations, shows browser session information: pages the customer was on, referrer, and (if recorded) a session replay link. Helpful when a customer says "the button isn't working" and you need to see what they were looking at.
Metadata
Custom metadata attached to the conversation, either by an integration, an automation, or manually. This is where business-specific fields surface.
Sidebar widgets
Custom widgets your team has built to pull data from your own systems — for example a wholesale account lookup, a warranty status check, or a CRM record. Sidebar widgets put your internal data right next to the conversation so agents don't have to context-switch into another tool.
The sidebar is your single source of context. Before asking the customer a question, scroll the sidebar — the answer is usually already there.