Customer mode

Customer mode turns a single workspace into a two-sided one: your team on one side, your clients on the other, each seeing only the people they are supposed to see. HushChat calls a client a customer, and the person who serves them an agent. Both are roles you assign by hand.

Access

Customer mode lives on Workspace Settings, which is available to workspace administrators only. If you are not an administrator, the screen is not shown to you.

Turning it on

Platform	How to get there
Web	Settings → Workspace Settings
iOS and Android	Admin tab → Workspace Settings

Flip Customer mode. It saves immediately; there is no confirmation step. The app describes it as "New invites join as customers, and agent/customer visibility rules apply: customers only see their assigned agents, agents only their assigned customers."

It is off by default.

Turning it on changes nothing by itself

This surprises people, so it is worth being blunt about: switching Customer mode on re-roles nobody. No existing member's view narrows, no conversation disappears, and administrators and members carry on seeing exactly what they saw before.

Two things follow from the switch, and only two:

1. Everyone you invite from that moment on arrives holding the Customer role. People invited earlier keep whatever role they already had.
2. The visibility rules start applying to a person the moment that person holds the Agent or Customer role — and not before.

Turn it on before you invite your clients

With Customer mode off, an invited client arrives as an ordinary member who can see your whole company, and you have to change each one by hand afterwards.

The four roles

You set a role under Settings → Users → the person → Role. The app describes them as:

Role	What it means
Admin	Full workspace management, sees everyone
Member	Regular user, sees everyone
Agent	Sees only assigned customers and admins
Customer	Sees only assigned agents

You are asked to confirm, and "You cannot change your own role."

The Agent role is not a promotion

While Customer mode is on, an agent can no longer talk to ordinary members, or to other agents. Only to their assigned customers and to administrators.

Who sees whom

The person	Sees
Admin	Everyone
Member	Everyone
Agent	Their assigned customers, plus every administrator
Customer	Their assigned agents — and nobody else

A customer does not see administrators. Their directory is exactly the agents you assigned them, and nothing more.

Who can talk to whom

Visibility and permission to start a conversation are not quite the same thing, so here is the full picture while Customer mode is on:

	Admin	Member	Agent	Customer
Admin	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Member	Yes	Yes	No	No
Agent	Yes	No	No	Only if assigned
Customer	No	No	Only if assigned	No

Four consequences that catch people out:

• Agents cannot message ordinary members, and cannot message each other.
• Administrators cannot message customers at all. If you need to reach a customer yourself, give your own account the Agent role and assign yourself to them. There is no administrator override.
• Members can still find customers when searching — a member's directory is not narrowed — but starting a conversation is refused with "Cannot start a conversation with this user!".
• Customers cannot message each other, even two customers who share an agent.

Customers are one-to-one only

A customer can hold direct conversations and nothing else.

• Adding a customer to a group is refused: "Customers can only participate in direct conversations".
• Groups the customer was already in disappear from their conversation list for as long as the role applies, and opening one is refused.
• Bulk flows that add everybody in the workspace to a group quietly skip customers rather than failing.

Their place in those groups is not deleted, only hidden. Change the person's role away from Customer and the groups come back.

Assigning agents to a customer

1. Settings → Users.
2. Select the customer. Confirm their Role is Customer.
3. An Assigned Agents section appears below the role. It shows up only when Customer mode is on and the person holds the Customer role.
4. Select one or more agents. Each row reads Assign, and flips to Assigned.
5. Select Save Assigned Agents. The button only appears once you have actually changed something.

A customer can have several agents, and an agent can carry as many customers as you like.

If the section says "No agents in this workspace yet. Set a user's role to Agent first.", give somebody the Agent role first.

Saving replaces the whole list

Whatever is selected when you save becomes the complete set of that customer's agents. To unassign someone, deselect them and save. Saving with nothing selected is allowed, and leaves that customer able to see and message nobody at all.

Three limits to plan around:

• You assign from the customer's screen, never the agent's. There is no "assigned customers" list on an agent, so giving one agent ten customers means opening ten customers.
• The agent picker reads only the first 200 people in the workspace. In a larger workspace some agents will simply not be listed.
• The change is not pushed to the customer's app. The server is correct the moment you save, but a customer with HushChat already open keeps their old list until the app refetches. Ask them to reopen or refresh.

Nothing here deletes anything

Visibility is worked out fresh on every read, which makes all of this safely reversible:

• Unassigning an agent hides the conversation rather than deleting it.
• Re-assigning the same agent brings it straight back, with its full history.
• Changing a person's role away from Customer restores their groups.
• Turning Customer mode off restores everyone's view at once — every conversation, every group, every contact, exactly as it was.

Assignments are kept while the mode is off, so turning it back on picks up where you left off.