Understanding the Chat Feature

Public vs Private Chats

Written By Mike Forte

Last updated 11 days ago

Quote Chat: Public vs Private
What it is
Chat is a threaded message panel on every quote (the “Chat” tab). Both the MSP team and the quote recipient (the end customer) can post and read messages — but they don’t necessarily see the same ones.

Public messages
Who can send them: Quote managers and the quote recipient.
Who sees them: Everyone — the MSP team (managers, viewers) and the recipient.
Who gets notified by email:

  • The recipient — unless they authored the message

  • The opportunity owner — unless they authored the message

  • Any other user who has previously posted in that chat thread

Use case: Direct back-and-forth with the customer. “Can we adjust the quantity on line 3?” — that kind of conversation.

Private messages
Who can send them: Quote managers and quote viewers (internal MSP users only).
Who sees them: MSP-side users only. The recipient’s browser never receives private messages — they are filtered out server-side before the data is returned.
Who gets notified by email:

  • The opportunity owner (unless they authored the message)

  • Other internal chat participants

  • The recipient is never notified of a private message

Use case: Internal team notes. Pricing margin discussion, negotiation strategy, notes to the account manager. Anything the team needs to discuss about the quote without the customer seeing it.

Visual labels
Quote managers and viewers see a colored badge on every message: green “Public” or amber “Private”. The recipient sees no badge because they only ever receive public messages.

One special case to know about
When an internal approver declines a quote and writes a decline reason, that reason is automatically posted as a Private chat message. The customer never sees it.

Unread indicator
The chat has a stat document tracking the last-posted public timestamp and private timestamp separately, plus a per-user last-viewed timestamp. Managers get an unread badge if either public or private activity is newer than their last view. Recipients only see the badge for public activity.