Ask @Linbis in a conversation
Get an answer computed from your live freight records, with the rows it read cited underneath — and turn it into an email a person sends.
Type @Linbis in any conversation, ask your question in plain language, and the answer is posted in
the thread — computed from your live records, not from what a model remembers.
Steps
- In any conversation, start a message with
@Linbisand pick it from the mention list. - Ask the question the way you would ask a colleague — for example "where do Acme's files stand", "which shipments are waiting on customs", or "what did we quote Northline last week".
- Send. The answer appears as a message in the thread, so everyone in the conversation sees it.
What the answer contains
- One lead sentence, then the facts. The facts are printed from the rows Linbis actually read.
- Sources underneath — the shipments, quotes, invoices, emails, documents or contacts the answer was built from. Select one to open the record and check it yourself.
- Buttons, when there is an obvious next step: open the record, draft a notice, remind me, snooze, assign to me.
If nothing matched, the answer says so plainly rather than producing something plausible. A confidently wrong answer posted in a channel is worse than no answer, because it gets repeated to a customer.
It answers with your access, not with everything
The answer is restricted to records the asker is allowed to see. If you cannot open a shipment in Shipments, @Linbis will not describe it to you here.
In a channel with someone from outside your company, it is that person's access that applies — however senior the asker is — because the answer is posted where the outsider reads it. The last line of every answer names whose visibility produced it, so you always know which of the two you are looking at.
It reads; it does not change anything
Asking a question cannot move a shipment, change a status or send an email. Everything @Linbis does while answering is a read. The buttons under an answer are proposals: nothing happens until a person clicks one, and the click runs the action that was stored with the answer, not whatever the browser sends back.
Buttons expire. An answer from yesterday is a record of what was true yesterday — its actions stop being clickable, on the server as well as in the page.
Turning an answer into an email
When the answer is about something a customer should hear, Linbis composes the email and shows it in the thread as a draft card: recipient, subject, body, and any documents worth attaching.
A person sends it. The draft is created in the same PENDING state as every other drafted customer notification, which means:
- You read every word of it in the card before anything can leave the building.
- You can edit it, or open it in the Emails desk to change the recipients and attachments.
- It goes out only when you approve it there — through the normal send path, with the normal approval and the normal record of who sent what.
Nothing in this flow sends an email on its own. If you never approve the draft, no message is ever delivered.
Referencing a record while you ask
# works in the same message. Type # and part of a number — Linbis resolves it against the
database rather than pattern-matching the text, so it works with whatever numbering your company
uses. The reference becomes a chip anyone can click, and a shipment also unfurls a live card showing
where it stands right now.
This is also the quickest way to make a question specific: "@Linbis has #A0000012 cleared customs" beats describing the shipment in words.
Tips
- @Linbis has its own direct message if you want to ask something that does not belong in a shared channel. Open it from the top of the rail.
- The sources are the point. If an answer matters, spend the two seconds to open one and confirm it.
- Numbers in the lead sentence are checked against the rows that were read; a sentence that invents one is dropped rather than posted.