We're retiring Personio Conversations and transitioning all customers to the Personio Assistant. The Personio Assistant uses the latest AI technology to help employees find answers and reduce HR tickets.
Conversations remains available until 30 June 2026, or your renewal date, whichever comes first. We’ll remove access after that date. The Personio Assistant is included at no additional cost.
This article explains how to manage users in Personio Conversations, including the types of users, how functions are assigned, and how to involve external users.
User types in Conversations
Conversations distinguishes between two main types of users: experts and requesters.
Expert
An expert is usually a member of a team involved in internal service delivery, who receives and works on requests from employees. This is usually someone from your HR, Finance, Legal, Workplace IT, or Management teams. They have been assigned to the expert and can access Conversations from the main navigation bar when they are logged into Personio.
Requester
A requester is someone who submits requests to Conversations but does not receive or work on requests. This would include most employees from other departments. Conversations integrates into Slack and Microsoft Teams (email is enabled by default), providing requesters with a single point of contact and allowing them to submit requests in the way they are used to.
- When a requester submits a request, their employee information appears in the Requester tab of the resulting ticket. This allows the expert to see information, such as their name, role and department, and so on. You can click on the link in the employee's name to easily navigate to their employee profile in Personio.
- The employee attributes you can see in the Requester tab depend on which attributes are currently selected via the API credentials in Personio. To manage which attributes are visible in the Requester tab, and to ensure data privacy, see our article on how to implement Conversations.
Set up Expert and Requester functions
When setting up Conversations, the Administrator will need to create a custom "Conversations Expert" employee role in Personio's Settings. They can assign any users who will be taking care of employee requests (the experts) to this employee role. The Administrator has access to the "Conversations Expert" employee role by default. Learn how to create a custom employee role.
Every employee is automatically assigned as a requester once Conversations has been implemented.
The table below shows how the two functions are assigned and the permissions for each.
| Function | Assigned by | Rights |
| Expert |
The first expert: this person will likely be the Administrator with access to Conversations by default All following experts: by the Administrator / first expert |
The expert has access to Conversations in Personio, can create and edit teams, and can add new experts |
| Requester | Automatically |
The requester can send requests through Slack, Microsoft Teams, and email |
Assign an expert role
Note:
When you are setting up Conversations, the Administrator must create a custom employee role named "Conversations Expert" and define the permissions as "view all" in the Conversations section. Learn how to create a custom employee role.
To assign an employee to the expert role, follow these steps:
- Once you assign the relevant employee to the Conversations Expert role in Personio, you need to invite them as a user in Conversations.
- In Personio, select Conversations from the sidebar. Conversations opens as a new window.
- In Conversations, click your company name in the top left, then go to Settings > Users > Invite users.
- Select all users you want to invite from the dropdown menu, then choose the team they belong to. Click Add users.
The employee receives an invitation to Conversations. Once the employee accepts the invitation, they will have access to Conversations in Personio and can manage requests.
Involve external users in requests
Conversations allows you to involve external users as one-off collaborators in replies and internal notes. You can read more in the article Overview of Personio Conversations under the heading External collaboration.
Conversations also allows you to communicate with users who don't have a company email address. For example, if an external user sends an email to your company domain, you can convert this into a request in Conversations. Requests can also be received from external collaborators within your Slack workspace.