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Onboarding usually has a moment where you need a pile of things from the customer: configuration details, contact lists, records, files. The traditional answer is a long form the customer abandons. Thread’s answer is a customer collection: a full-screen guided flow inside the portal where a checklist of what’s needed sits on one side and a conversation drives it on the other. The customer answers in their own words, drops in files, and watches the checklist fill itself in. Collections are opened by an agent in your motion when its work needs structured input from the customer. Small, single asks stay as agent request cards on the portal home; a collection is for the multi-section gather.

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How the customer enters it

An open collection appears at the top of the portal home as a “Set up your account” card — the requesting agent’s name, its own framing of what’s needed and why, a count of sections to complete, and a Get started button. That button leads to a real page with its own URL, so the flow survives a refresh and the customer can leave and come back without losing anything.

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The flow

The desktop layout puts the requirements panel on the left — the hero, roughly 60% of the screen — and the chat on the right as the driver. (On mobile, the requirements collapse to a progress bar that expands into the full checklist.)
  • The agent opens the conversation. The customer doesn’t face a blank screen — the agent greets them, says what’s still needed, and picks up wherever they left off.
  • The customer answers by typing or by dropping files. The composer reads “Type your answer, or attach a file…” — either path works for any item.
  • The checklist fills in live. As the customer answers, the matching cells in the requirements panel populate immediately and the per-section progress counts up. Chat-side progress shows as quiet one-line steps (“Saving your details” → “Saved 3 details”) — never raw tool output.
  • Files are mined for answers. A dropped spreadsheet or PDF is read server-side and its contents extracted into the checklist, with a count of items that need a double-check (“Read 12 items — 3 to double-check”). The customer confirms or corrects in chat.
The panel always shows overall progress (“4 of 6 sections done”) and offers a “Review everything” toggle to expand every section, so the customer can audit what’s been collected before sending it.

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Submitting

When every section is complete — or the agent judges the collection ready — a Submit when ready footer appears in the requirements panel. On submit, the customer sees “All set — your details are in.” and returns to the portal home, where the submission is listed under “What you’ve sent” with a “View what you sent” receipt.
Submission is always an explicit customer action on the panel — the agent narrating “we’re done” never submits on its own, and a deterministic backstop guarantees the Submit control appears once the checklist is actually complete.

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What lands back on your side

  • The confirmed answers are recorded on the account as a structured collection artifact — the schema-keyed body of everything the customer provided, exactly as they confirmed it.
  • The requesting agent resumes automatically. The agent that opened the collection was holding for it; completion releases the hold and it picks its work back up with the data in hand.
  • Your team is notified that the collection came back, on the account’s event stream.
  • Files uploaded during the flow are stored against the customer’s portal identity and used for extraction into the draft; the collection’s confirmed result — not the raw file dump — is the record of truth.

Portal overview

Where the collection launcher and “What you’ve sent” receipts live on the portal home.

Motion agents

The agents that open collections, and how their autonomy and approvals work.