Adding a teammate to a conversation
A demand conversation does not have to be a one-person affair. You can bring a technical colleague from your purchasing side, or the manager who assesses pricing with you, into the very same conversation. That way nobody has to copy messages and forward them by email; everyone sits in the same room and sees the same information.
As the invite window itself puts it: Add someone from your company. Offers and conversation will be shared with them.
Where to open the invite window
The invite is opened from inside a conversation with a supplier.
- Open the relevant demand from My Demands and switch to the Messages tab.
- Select the supplier you want to talk to from the list on the left; the conversation opens on the right.
- Click the people icon (Invite teammate) to the left of the message composer.
There is a second route to the same window: click the round participant icons in the conversation header, or the supplier's name, and the Participants window opens; the Invite teammate button there takes you to the same list.
If the conversation has been closed (you will see This conversation is closed — read only. at the bottom), neither the message composer nor the invite button is shown.
Who appears in the list
Only members of your own company appear in the list that opens. Each row shows the person's initial and name.
- People already in the conversation do not appear in the list. That makes it practically impossible to add the same person a second time; even if you did, the second addition would change nothing, and nobody is ever listed twice.
- There is no need to add yourself; you are already in the conversation, so your own name does not appear in the list either.
- If there is nobody left to add from your company, you will see Everyone from your company is already in this conversation.
- If the list fails to load, the warning Couldn't load. Please try again. appears along with a Retry button. In that case an empty list is never assumed; the error itself is shown.
You cannot add an employee of the other side. This is an absolute rule: people from another company never appear in the list at all, and the system will not accept anyone from outside being added. Someone who has left your company, or whose account has been suspended, cannot be brought into the conversation either.
Sending the invite
When you click a person in the list, the row is marked as selected. Then press the Send invite button. Once the invite goes through, the window returns to the Participants list, where you will see the person you have just added.
When the conversation holds more than two people, a Group label and the participant count appear in the header, and the round icons at the top multiply. In the Participants window, each row shows the name, the company and the side (Buyer side / Supplier side). The first two rows represent the two sides of the conversation — the buyer company and the supplier company — and carry the Owner label; people added later are listed beneath them. On your own row you will see the You label instead of Owner.
What the other side sees
The person you added also appears in the other side's participant list — by name, and with your company's name. In other words, the supplier knows that one more person from the buyer company has joined the conversation.
Users' underlying identity records, however, are never shared between the parties. The other side sees the name, the company and which side the person is on; the person's underlying user identity never crosses over. The privacy rule works both ways: you likewise do not see the user identities of the people on the supplier side.
Why this works
In natural stone purchasing, the decision is not made on price alone: vein direction, thickness tolerance, surface finish and delivery timing are usually the responsibility of different people. Bringing the buyer and the technical lead into the same conversation spares the supplier from being asked the same question twice, keeps the answer from getting lost inside your team, and speeds up offer evaluation.
The conversation still remains specific to that one demand: the invite brings the person into the room belonging to the demand and supplier you selected, and does not carry them into any other conversation. The person's permission to see demands and offers comes from their membership in your company; the invite does not widen that permission.