Build a customer support bot with your AI assistant

This guide builds a customer support bot that answers from your help pages and hands off to a person when it can't help. You won't run any tools yourself: you describe what you want, and your assistant does the work. If you haven't connected yet, start with Connect your AI assistant.

Who can do this: team owners and admins. Your assistant can only create or change bots in teams where you have one of these roles.

1. Ask your assistant

One prompt is enough to start. For example:

Build me a customer support bot for my company. Use the help pages at https://help.example.com as its knowledge, and add a way for customers to reach a human if the bot can't answer.

Your assistant works through the steps below. Knowing them helps you steer it and check the result.

2. It creates the bot

Your assistant creates the bot (create_bot) with support-focused instructions, so it answers in your tone and stays on topic. The bot gets a website widget straight away, so you can try it. To shape the instructions yourself, see Write your bot's instructions.

3. It adds your knowledge

Your assistant previews which pages of your help site would be added (discover_pages), narrows the list if needed, then adds them as a website data source (add_data_source). This grounds the bot's answers in your content rather than guesswork. More on this in Add your website.

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Better answers from many pages

For a support bot that reads lots of pages, ask your assistant to turn on enhanced retrieval and to raise how much content the bot reads per answer (update_bot). Enhanced retrieval rewrites a follow-up question into a full question before searching, which helps a lot in real conversations. If your content is many short entries, such as FAQ one-liners or a product list, a lower relevance threshold helps short entries get found. See Retrieval settings.

4. It adds a way to reach a person

A support bot should never leave a customer stuck. Your assistant adds a hand-off power-up, such as Talk to a human, or an action that emails your team or calls your API. It checks which power-ups exist, reads the settings they need, then creates one (see How your assistant configures things).

5. It tests the bot

Ask your assistant to test with questions you know the answers to:

Ask the support bot what our refund window is, and check it cites the right page.

Your assistant starts a test chat (start_chat), sends the question (send_message) and reads the reply, including which pages it used. That tells you whether the bot is answering from your content or guessing. Test messages use your message tokens like any other chat.

On the Enterprise plan, you can also ask it to save these as test cases (create_test_case) and run them whenever you change the bot (start_test_run), so you catch answers that get worse over time. See Test your bot.

6. Put it live

When you're happy, your assistant can style the website widget to match your brand (update_web_channel). To add the widget to your site, follow Install the chat widget, or see Channels for Slack, WhatsApp and more.

Keep going

From here, keep asking in plain words. For example:

"Make the bot's answers shorter and friendlier."
"Add our pricing page and blog as knowledge, and re-sync every week."
"Send new conversations to our CRM with a webhook."
"Show me the last 10 conversations and tell me what the bot got wrong."

See What your AI assistant can do for the full list, and Control what your AI assistant can access for permissions.