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Flex Conversations Roles

Flex Conversations use Conversations API roles to manage participant permissions when adding participants to a Conversation or when using the Conversations SDK to connect.

The Role Resource represents what a User (e.g. agent, admin, supervisor) can do within the Conversation Service and individual Conversations. Roles are scoped to either a Service or a Conversation.

Flex Conversation Service

Users are assigned a Role at the Service level. This determines what they can do within the Conversation Service instance, such as creating and destroying Conversations within the Service.

Participants are assigned a Role at the Conversation level. This determines what they are able to do within a particular Conversation, such as inviting Participants to be members of the Conversation, posting Messages, and removing other Participants from the Conversation.

Which Roles does Flex create out-of-the-box?

Flex creates the Conversation Service and adds the following Service and Conversation Roles during the initial Flex account setup.

Service Roles

Role: admin

Default Permissions:

joinConversation
deleteConversation
addParticipant
removeParticipant
editConversationAttributes
editOwnUserInfo
editAnyUserInfo

Role: supervisor

Default Permissions:

joinConversation
addParticipant
removeParticipant
editOwnUserInfo

Conversation Roles

Role: guest [DEFAULT]

Default Permissions:

sendMessage
sendMediaMessage
leaveConversation

Role: agent

Default Permissions:

editConversationAttributes
sendMessage
sendMediaMessage
leaveConversation
editOwnMessage
editOwnMessageAttributes
deleteOwnMessage

Role: admin

Default Permissions:

editConversationAttributes
sendMessage
sendMediaMessage
leaveConversation
editOwnMessage
editOwnMessageAttributes
deleteOwnMessage
editAnyMessage
editAnyMessageAttributes
deleteAnyMessage

Role: supervisor

Default Permissions:

editConversationAttributes
sendMessage
sendMediaMessage
leaveConversation
editOwnMessage
editOwnMessageAttributes
deleteOwnMessage
editAnyMessage
editAnyMessageAttributes
deleteAnyMessage

How does Flex use these Roles?

The first time a worker logs in, Flex creates a corresponding Conversation User.

For workers authenticating through the Twilio Console, the corresponding Flex Conversation Service User will be created with the admin role.
For workers authenticating via a third-party IdP (identity provider), Flex creates a corresponding Conversation Service User according to their SSO role: agent, supervisor, or admin.

Once a worker logs in successfully, the Flex UI initializes the Conversations SDK with a token that includes the grants:

The token includes Flex Roles grants based on the user role (agent/supervisor/admin) that is set in the IdP.
The Conversation User Service Role is updated (in the Conversations Users database) based on the Flex Role grants (an agent can be promoted to a supervisor, or vice versa).

Known limitations

Regardless of what role you have as a Flex user, Flex Conversations uses the default configured role — guest — when adding the user to a Conversation or Chat Task.
Conversations limits also apply to Flex Conversations limits.