Overview

Sparrow Intel is built for multi-agent teams from day one. This lesson covers the features that let your team work the inbox together without crossing wires: real-time presence, internal notes, internal discussion, mentions, and handoffs.

If you're a solo operator, you can skim this lesson — but a couple of features (internal notes especially) are useful even on a team of one.

Real-time presence

When two or more agents are in Conversations, you can see each other working in real time:

• Avatars on the conversation header — anyone currently viewing the same conversation
• Typing indicator — appears when a teammate is composing a reply
• Selection awareness — you can tell when someone has a conversation open

This works across browser tabs and machines without you doing anything. The point is to prevent two people from sending the same reply, or from one person doing work the other has already finished.

If a conversation is open in someone else's window, it's not locked — you can still open it. Use your judgment, or coordinate via internal notes (below).

Internal notes

Internal notes are private comments attached to a conversation that the guest never sees. Use them for:

• Context that would help a teammate reading the thread later ("Guest is the property owner's brother — handle accordingly")
• Status updates when you can't immediately reply ("Reached out to the cleaner; waiting to hear back")
• Reasoning behind a decision ("Approved the partial refund based on confirmed AC outage on day 2")

Internal notes show inline on the conversation thread, visually distinct from real messages so you can't confuse them.

To add an internal note, look for the toggle or tab in the composer area — typically labeled "Internal note" or with an icon distinct from "Send message." Type your note and post.

⚠️ Internal notes never go to the guest. But the rule "everything you write at work could end up in a screenshot" still applies. Keep notes professional.

Internal discussion

Internal discussion is a richer side-thread for back-and-forth between teammates on a single conversation. Where a single internal note is "I jotted this down for context," internal discussion is "let's talk about how to handle this."

Inside discussion you can:

• Post messages
• @mention teammates to get their attention
• Edit your own posts (if you typoed something)
• Delete your own posts
• See an audit trail of who said what when

Mentioned teammates get a notification (in-app, and depending on their notification settings, email). This is the right way to pull in a supervisor on a tricky thread, or to ask a specialist for input.

Handoffs

A handoff is when one agent passes a conversation to another. The pattern that works well:

1. Set context — drop an internal note or a discussion message explaining where things stand and what's needed next
2. @mention the receiving teammate so they get notified
3. Re-assign the conversation to them

This is not a button labeled "handoff" — it's the combination of the four steps above. Sparrow Intel supports each step natively; the workflow is up to you.

Rules of thumb for collaboration

A few patterns that keep teams smooth:

• If you're going to be slow to reply, drop an internal note. "Reached out to cleaner, ETA 2 hours" tells the next teammate not to chase the same lead.
• Don't reply to a guest with a question that has an answer in your internal notes. Read the right-hand panel before composing.
• Use @mentions sparingly. Notifications fatigue is real. Mention when you actually need someone's attention.
• Re-assign rather than hand-off-by-message. A conversation with the wrong assignee will keep showing up in the wrong queue.

What about CC-ing or forwarding to people outside Sparrow Intel?

For email-channel conversations, the email composer supports To/Cc fields the same way any email client does. You can loop someone outside the system in via Cc or Bcc.

For chat-style channels like Airbnb, there's no equivalent because the channel itself doesn't support it. The way to loop in an external party is to copy the relevant context out and email it (often using a template).

Up next

The AI Sidebar: Sentiment, Issues, Categories, Knowledge — your team can now collaborate. Time to make full use of the AI insights that are sitting there waiting on every conversation.