Where continuity usually breaks
- Conversion creates a new record and leaves the old messages on the dead one.
- Threads are keyed to a job, so pre-sale conversation disappears once work starts.
- A second phone number arrives and starts an unlinked second history.
- Someone deletes a lead to 'clean up', taking the conversation with it.
- Messages are copied into timelines, so the same words exist in three places with three timestamps.
Scoping without fragmenting
A repeat customer with a roof job in March and a gutter job in September does not want one undifferentiated stream, and neither does your crew. The workable model is a single customer-level history with job-level scoping: every message can be read at customer level, and messages created in the context of a job are labelled with it.
The failure at the other extreme is fragmenting by job so aggressively that nobody can see the relationship. If your team has to open three jobs to reconstruct what a customer was promised, continuity is gone.
Continuity is not the same as timeline
Conversations belong in the inbox. Record timelines belong to business events: created, assigned, sent, signed, scheduled, paid. Dumping every text into a timeline destroys it as an audit trail, because the important events drown in small talk.
The disciplined version is that a message which changes something — a confirmation, a reschedule request, a stop request — produces an event on the timeline, and the event links back to the message.