The Conversation Sidebar
A tour of the right-hand panel — where to find context, and what you can act on without leaving the conversation.
When you open a conversation, the right-hand panel shows everything Octocom knows about the customer and the situation. Two things make it worth learning properly:
- Most of the time you don't need to ask the customer for information that's already on the screen.
- Several sections are interactive. You can refund an order, cancel it, or change a shipping address from here — without opening your store admin.
Which sections appear depends on what's connected for your business, and the customer-specific ones only show once a customer is identified on the conversation.
Assignee
Who owns the conversation. Appears once the conversation has been handed off — while the bot owns it, there is nothing to assign. See Assignment & Routing.
Tags
Conversation tags applied to this specific conversation. Tags drive views, reporting and routing — see Tags & Priority. You can create a new tag inline from here.
Priority
No priority, Low, Medium or High. Priority is filterable in views and usable as an assignment-rule condition. Hidden if your business runs an external help desk, where priority lives in that system instead.
Customer
The customer's name, email, phone, their Instagram username where relevant, and any custom fields your integrations have attached.
This section is editable — if a customer gives you a corrected email or a phone number mid-conversation, save it here rather than keeping it in your head. Everything downstream, including future conversation matching, uses it.
Conversation Details
The business the conversation belongs to, its ID (copyable, and the fastest way to reference a conversation to us or to a teammate), any CSAT rating and comment the customer left, and the closed and handed-off timestamps.
Other conversations
The customer's previous conversations. Useful for spotting repeat issues and ongoing complaints, and each one carries a Merge button if two threads should be a single conversation — see Email auto-merging. Merging requires the current conversation to be handed off first.
Orders
Recent orders from your connected store — Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, or a custom integration — with status, line items, fulfillment and tracking.
This is the section most people underuse. Depending on your integration you can also:
- Refund an order, in full or partially
- Cancel an order
- Edit the shipping or billing address
- Hold or release fulfillment
Doing it here rather than in your store admin keeps the action on the conversation record, so the next person to open it can see what happened.
Subscriptions
Plan, status, next billing date and history for customers on a subscription.
Gift cards
Gift cards owned by or associated with the customer.
Returns
Active and past returns against the customer's orders, with status and reason. Answers "where's my refund?" without a context switch.
Sidebar widgets
Custom panels your team has built to pull data from your own systems — a wholesale account lookup, a warranty check, a CRM record. See Sidebar Widgets.
Browser Session Details
For web chat, what the customer was doing on your site: pages visited, referrer, and a session replay link where recorded. Helpful when someone says "the button isn't working" and you need to see what they were looking at.
Email thread
For email conversations, the underlying thread structure — useful when a thread spans several messages with different recipients or CCs.
Topics
What the conversation is about, classified automatically. Topics come from a list you configure per business, not free-form text, so they stay consistent enough to filter and report on. A conversation can carry several.
Data collection
Fields captured by a data collection flow — an order ID, an email, uploaded photos — surfaced here so you don't have to scroll the transcript for them.
Sentiment
Auto-detected customer sentiment from Strongly Negative to Strongly Positive, with a short reason. Useful for catching an unhappy customer before they escalate.
Customer tags
Tags on the customer profile, which persist across all of their conversations — vip, wholesale, repeat-buyer. Distinct from conversation tags above: these describe who the customer is, not what this interaction was about.
Metadata
Custom metadata attached to the conversation by an integration, an automation, or the chat widget. This is where business-specific fields surface, and anything here is addressable in a macro as {{metadata.<key>}}.
System Details
Internal identifiers, collapsed by default. You'll rarely need these, but they're what to quote if you're reporting a problem to us.
The sidebar is your single source of context. Before asking the customer a question, scroll it — the answer is usually already there, and increasingly the action is too.