AI agent

The AI agent answers customers on the channels you choose, around the clock. It answers only from the description of your business and your published knowledge articles, says that it is automated, and hands the conversation to your team when it does not know the answer or the customer needs a person. In the workspace the agent is called Assistant.

Before you start

• The agent is available when your plan includes Assistant that replies to customers and AI assistant. A company that uses its own AI key gets both, unless the platform has turned them off for it. See Use your own AI key.
• Articles need Knowledge articles in your plan.
• Only owners and administrators can set up the agent.
• The agent runs only when three things are on: the plan feature, Turn the assistant on in its settings, and the agent on the channel itself.

Set up the agent

1. Open Conversations, then select Assistant.
2. Tick Turn the assistant on.
3. Fill in About the business, up to 4,000 characters: what you sell, opening hours, delivery, returns and anything customers often ask. This is required while the agent is on.
4. Check First line of every conversation, up to 200 characters. It is added before the agent's first answer and must say the customer is talking to an automated assistant. It cannot be empty.
5. Check Message when passing to the team, up to 300 characters. It is sent when the agent hands over. Leave it empty to hand over without a message.
6. Set Most replies before passing to the team, from 1 to 30. The default is 8.
7. Select Save.
8. Under Channels, select Turn on for each channel where the agent should answer.

Give it knowledge

Besides About the business, the agent reads your knowledge articles that are Published and visible to Customers. Drafts, archived articles and articles for Team only are never used.

1. Open Conversations, then Knowledge.
2. Write a Title (up to 160 characters) and the Text (up to 20,000 characters).
3. Set Status to Published and Who can see it to Customers.
4. Select Save.

For each answer, the agent picks the articles that share the most words with what the customer wrote, up to 12,000 characters in total. It matches words, not meaning, so use the words your customers use. Short, focused articles work better than one long one. See Tickets and knowledge for more about articles.

How it answers

• A customer writes on a channel where the agent is on. The message is saved first, then the agent answers, normally within a minute.
• The first answer in a conversation starts with your First line of every conversation.
• It answers in the language of the customer's last message, in at most four short sentences.
• It declines questions that have nothing to do with your business.
• It never invents prices, stock, dates or policies that are not in your text.
• If a question flow is active on the channel, the flow runs first and the agent takes over after it.

When it hands over to your team

The agent passes the conversation to a person when:

• the answer is not in your description or articles;
• the customer asks for a person, is upset, or wants to pay, complain or cancel;
• it has sent the most replies you allowed;
• your AI credits for the month have run out;
• the AI provider fails, declines or gives an unusable answer.

When it hands over, it sends your Message when passing to the team, and the person the conversation is assigned to gets the notification A customer needs a person: …. The conversation shows A person has this conversation. The assistant is not answering.

Your team stays in charge

• As soon as anyone on your team replies, the agent stops answering in that conversation.
• To hand it back, select Give back to the assistant in the conversation. Its reply count starts again.
• When a customer writes again in a closed conversation, the agent answers again.
• While the agent is answering, the conversation shows The assistant is answering this conversation. and its messages are labelled Assistant.
• The alerts for customers left waiting, set under Home, Alerts and automations, are not sent for conversations the agent is handling.

Turn the agent off

Clear Turn the assistant on and select Save to stop it for the whole company, or select Turn off next to a channel under Channels to stop it on that channel. Every conversation the agent was answering there goes back to your team at once, without a message to the customer. Those conversations show The assistant is not part of this conversation. and get the waiting-customer alerts again.

When you turn the agent back on, it picks up a conversation when the customer next writes, unless the conversation was handed over to a person.

What the agent sees and what it cannot do

The agent receives your business description, the chosen articles and the conversation's last 12 messages, including text written out from voice messages. Before anything is sent, the customer's name and company name are replaced, and email addresses, phone numbers and links are removed. Names of other people that appear in the messages may remain.

The agent does not see orders, amounts, addresses, deals or notes, so nobody can talk it into revealing them. It writes text only: it cannot change records, send files or send templates. It has no working hours setting.

AI credits

Every answer uses AI credits from your plan's monthly allowance: 1 credit for each 1,000 tokens read and written, rounded up. Before each answer, 5 credits are held; if they are not available, the agent hands over instead of answering. With your own AI key, answers are billed by your provider and use no credits.

See what it did

Open Reports, then What the AI agent did, and choose 7, 30 or 90 days. Owners and administrators see:

Orders after a conversation are a sign of the agent's effect, not proof that it made the sale.

Troubleshooting