The assigned inbox
Only your conversations, with the ones waiting longest and spending most surfaced first. No settings menus, no connection panels, nothing that is not the conversation in front of you.
For virtual assistant roles
What You Are Given to Work With
The role comes with tooling: a Velvet workspace holding an inbox scoped to your assignments, a fan record carrying the history you need before you reply, a library you can sell from without leaving the thread, and reply suggestions you can use or ignore.
The four things you work in
The fan record
What this person has bought, tipped and subscribed to, where they sit in the client's lifecycle stages, and the notes previous shifts left. This is the tool that makes replies land.
The library picker
The client's content, filtered to what you are allowed to sell, attachable and priceable inside the thread without switching screens.
Reply suggestions
Drafts you can take, edit or discard. They speed up the routine half of a queue; they are not a substitute for reading the fan record, and a client can tell the difference.
Reading the assistant state before you settle in
A conversation carries a state that says whether anything other than you might speak in it. In manual and muted nothing is sent automatically. In automatic the assistant may step in while the client side is offline.
Checking it takes a second and tells you whether the thread is yours alone. Changing it is the client's call rather than yours, and each change is logged with who made it, what it moved from and to, and a reason.
Training is the client's, not the platform's
Velvet supplies the tools. What to say, which content to lead with, how a particular audience likes to be spoken to — that is the client's knowledge and a good one hands it over properly, usually as a brief and a set of examples.
It is a fair question in an interview: what onboarding do you give, and who do I ask when I am unsure? A client with no answer is expecting you to guess in their voice, which is the most common reason a placement goes badly in the first week.
Suggestions are a starting point, not the job
Drafted replies handle the repetitive part of a queue well and the part that requires memory badly. A suggestion does not know what this fan was promised last Tuesday; the fan record does, and you are the one reading it.
The clients paying the most are the ones who noticed the difference between a queue that is answered and a queue that is understood. Leaning entirely on suggestions puts you in the first category.
How the assistant behaves
- Assistant states
- 4Automatic, forced, manual and muted — readable by everyone in the conversation.
- Who sets the state
- The clientNot you. Every change is recorded with who made it and why.
- In manual and muted
- Nothing sends itselfAutomatic means it may answer only while the client side is away.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to install anything?
No. The workspace runs in the browser and works on a laptop; you need a reliable connection more than you need particular hardware.
Does an assistant reply for me?
Only if the client has set the conversation to automatic, and then only while the client side is away. In manual and muted nothing sends itself. The state is visible to you.
Who trains me on the client's voice?
The client. Ask what onboarding they provide before you accept — it is one of the clearest signals of how the engagement will go.
Can I use my own saved replies?
Within whatever the client agrees. The useful ones are grounded in that specific audience, which is why they are worth building over the first weeks rather than importing.