Chat agent

Plans and permissions:

• Add-on: AI agents, billed separately
• Change chat agent settings: Admin, Manager, or Team Lead role, or a custom role with Chat agent settings set to Can edit chat agent settings
• With Can view chat agent settings, you can see a chat agent’s settings but not change them.

Use the chat agent to answer customer questions in a chat widget on your website, help center, or app, from simple FAQs to multi-step requests. It answers from your knowledge base and workflows, recognizes when a conversation needs a person, and hands it off to your team with the details they need. You choose how it looks, what it says, how it hands off, and how it closes conversations.

To open it, go to AI support > Chat agent, and select a chat agent from the Chat agents list.

Navigating the chat agent settings

To test a chat agent in a full conversation after you save, go to AI quality > AI agent testing.

How the chat agent works

• Answers: the chat agent answers from your knowledge base, and follows your workflows for requests that need several steps or a lookup in your systems.
• Handoffs: it decides when to involve your team, often before the customer asks, based on signals such as frustration, sensitive topics, or a request for a person. See Handoff tab.
• Insights: you can review each conversation and its outcome in AI quality > QA review, without waiting for QA or CSAT scores. See Quality review.
• Several chat agents: you can run more than one chat agent, for example one per website or audience, each with its own settings. See Create more chat agents.
• Brands: each chat agent can use a brand from Brand studio, which supplies its style, knowledge access, and persona. You can override the brand’s settings for one chat agent.

Create more chat agents

Create a separate chat agent for each place where chat should look or behave differently, such as:

• Brands: each of your brands or websites gets its own branded chat.
• Audiences: a marketplace with separate buyer and seller portals gives each portal a chat that answers for that audience.
• Contexts: your marketing site and your product use different styling or messages.

Each chat agent has its own installation script, so put each one on a different page. Don’t install two chat agents on the same page.

To create one, go to AI support > Chat agent and select Create new chat agent. From an open chat agent, you can also use the Agent actions menu next to Manage activation to select Create new agent or Duplicate agent.

Activate the chat agent

The chat widget doesn’t appear on your site until you activate it.

1. Open the chat agent, and select Manage activation.
2. Under Chat availability, choose an option:
   • Activate for all visitors: everyone sees the chat widget.
   • Gradual rollout: a percentage of visitors you set in Visibility percentage see it. The same visitors keep seeing it over time.
   • Deactivate for all visitors: no one sees it.
3. Select Activate chat, Update activation, or Deactivate.

The chat agent’s status, such as Active or Gradual rollout, shows next to its name. Your site can also override these settings with the installation script. See Chat widget advanced setup.

Content tab

Homepage

With Enable homepage on, the chat opens on a homepage where customers can open your help links or start a conversation. With it off, the chat opens straight to a conversation.

With homepage	Without homepage

Terms of service

After you select Display your company’s terms and conditions to users, choose how customers acknowledge them:

Then provide your terms as text in the chat, or as a link to a URL.

Themes tab

If the chat agent uses a brand, the brand’s color and agent persona are used unless you override them.

Handoff tab

The Handoff tab sets how conversations reach your team, and when.

Handoff method

You can also set the message the chat agent sends before and after a handoff. Under Live agent handoff exceptions, you can require JWT authentication for Live agent handoffs, so customers who aren’t signed in get an email ticket instead, or let customers choose between a Live agent handoff and an email ticket.

Note: With Zendesk, Live agent handoffs go through Zendesk Sunshine Conversations. They work with Zendesk Messaging in the Zendesk Suite Professional plan, or with Sunshine Conversations directly. You don’t need to change your existing Zendesk setup.

Handoff criteria

Sensitivity sets how quickly the chat agent hands off. It considers signals such as:

• Negative sentiment: the customer is frustrated, or isn’t getting what they need.
• Sensitive subjects: the customer is very upset, wants to cancel, or raises another major issue.
• Stated intent: the customer asks to talk to your team or a manager.

Start with Standard, and change it only if testing shows you need to.

In the same card, you can add topic-based handoff triggers for topics that should always go to your team, and Profile-specific handoff instructions that guide this chat agent’s handoff decisions. For what to put in each, see Chat agent instructions and style.

Case creation and configuration

• Case creation behavior: create a case in your help desk only when a conversation is handed off, or always, including for resolved and abandoned conversations.
• Configuration: the Live agent avatar, the email sender for email tickets, and whether to hand off automatically when a system error occurs.
• Business hours: for Live agent handoffs, the handoff type and message to use outside your business hours.

Collect customer information

When a conversation is handed off, the chat agent can collect details from the customer to fill in the support ticket. It checks the conversation and your systems first, and only asks for what it doesn’t have.

• Default fields: Email is always collected. You can add Name, Description, Category, and Attachments, change each field’s label, and make it required.
• Smart fields: select Add smart field to collect any other information you’ve set up as a smart field, such as an account number. To send these values to your help desk, see Connected platform fields.

Wrap-up tab

The Wrap-up tab closes conversations that have gone quiet. After a period of inactivity, the chat agent checks whether the customer needs anything else, then closes the conversation and, optionally, asks for feedback.

To set up wrap-up, select Enable automatic wrap-up handling, then set the flow:

1. If the user does not respond for: how long to wait after the chat agent’s last message before it sends the confirmation message.
2. Send confirmation message: the message that asks whether the customer needs anything else. Customers see two quick action buttons to answer with, or they can type a reply.
3. Send closing message: sent if the customer selects the quick action for being done, or doesn’t respond within the time you set under Or if user does not respond for.
4. Send follow-up message: sent if the customer selects the other quick action, and the chat agent carries on helping.

Closing survey

Select Enable closing survey to ask for feedback, such as CSAT, after the wrap-up. Under Survey visibility, choose All conversations or Handed off only.

If you use Stella Connect, you can send its surveys after chat conversations instead, under Stella Connect surveys.

Setup tab

Use knowledge tag filters when you run chat agents for different audiences, such as separate brands or a buyer portal and a seller portal, so each one answers only from the articles that apply. To see which tags your articles have, go to Configure > Knowledge.