How the assistant works

The assistant is an AI that replies first to new conversations. It answers from your documentation, and it passes the conversation to your team when a person should help. It is off until you turn it on. See Settings and instructions.

How it answers

When a customer writes, the assistant searches your documentation site and replies with an answer. When the answer links to a page of your documentation, the chat shows the page as a card with its title and summary. The customer can rate each answer with a thumbs up or down.

If the customer only says hello, the assistant asks what they need. If their question is too vague to answer, it asks once for the details that matter.

While the assistant handles a conversation, the conversation stays out of your team's views. You can still find it in the Assistant view of the inbox.

What it knows about the customer

With Use customer facts in answers on, the assistant also sees:

• The customer's activity on your website in the last 48 hours, and errors they ran into in the last 7 days.
• Their account and billing, but only once their email is verified. See Identified chat.

It can also look at up to 3 images the customer sent. It only reads this information. It never changes anything.

When it hands off

The assistant passes the conversation to your team when:

• The customer asks for a person.
• The customer says the answer did not help.
• The question is on a topic in Always hand off.
• Your documentation does not answer the question, or the assistant is not confident in its answer.
• It has given the most answers allowed in Max answers.
• No documentation site is connected, or it hit an error.

The customer is told that a person will reply. Your team sees a note with the reason, and the conversation moves to your team's views. Your team also gets an alert in Slack or by push notification, if those are set up.

It never talks over your team

As soon as a teammate replies, the assistant stops answering that conversation for good.