Helpdesk

Your customers' conversations – from the chat on your site, from your support email, and the calls and visits your team records by hand – in one queue, each conversation bound to the customer record. The agent answering a ticket sees who they're talking to: lifetime value, orders, segment, and every previous conversation.

You'll find it under Customers → Helpdesk.

Where conversations come from

Site chat. When Support chat is enabled on your Website SDK, the on-site messenger gets a Support tab. Visitors write to you there – anonymously, or as an identified customer if they've logged in on your site. Replies you send from the Helpdesk appear in their chat within seconds.

Email. Every Helpdesk has an inbound address (support-…@inbound.theaicmo.com). Anything sent or forwarded there becomes a conversation. Three ways to connect your real support address, all under Setup → Integrations → Support inbox:

• Forwarding – add your support address and forward it to the inbound address at your mail provider. Replies you send go out from your address whenever your sending setup allows, and customer replies come back into the Helpdesk automatically.
• Hosted support address – the complete setup. Delegate one unused subdomain (for example help.yourbrand.com), add the DNS records shown, and the address works in both directions: customers write to it and replies come from it. Your existing company email is never touched.
• Connect via IMAP – your mail runs on your own servers? Provide IMAP credentials; the connection is tested live before anything is saved, credentials are stored encrypted, and only mail arriving after the connection is read. New mail lands in the Helpdesk within a minute.
• Send replies through your mail server (SMTP) – the outgoing half of that connection. Add your SMTP host, port and login (usually the same as IMAP); the login is tested live, and from then on every Helpdesk reply leaves from your support address through your own server. This is support-only: the brand's marketing sending is never touched.

The Replies send from setting controls the outgoing identity when no SMTP server is connected: Auto uses your own address or verified domain whenever possible and the platform address otherwise – customer replies always find their way back to the Helpdesk either way.

Logged by hand. A phone call, someone at the counter, a message that reached you somewhere we do not read – New ticket, top right, records it on the desk like any other conversation. See Logging a call or a visit below.

Everyone who can open the brand – its owner, the organization's owners, admins and managers, and brand members – sees the same inbox, queue and canned replies, whoever connected the mailbox.

Logging a call or a visit

Support does not stop at the channels we read. New ticket opens a form that takes about twenty seconds:

1. What happened – Phone call, In person, or Other. (E-mail is not on the list on purpose: mail already arrives on its own, and a hand-made e-mail thread would look like one the customer wrote to while threading nowhere. A mail that reached you elsewhere is Other.)
2. Customer – start typing a name, an e-mail address, a phone number or a customer number and the brand's records come back as you type, each with what is already on file: company, segment, how many conversations you have had before, and how long they have been on record. Arrow keys move through the list, Enter picks. Nobody matching? Create a new customer takes their details, or log the call with just a name and a number – the ticket keeps both, and you can attach a record later.
3. Subject, the first note, priority, assignee and tags. The note is internal, like every note; you add more over time as the case moves.

The ticket opens in the thread. It sits in the queue as Open and is not marked as waiting for a reply – the call was already answered on the phone – until you move it to Pending or Resolved yourself. Reporting counts it under its own channel and never counts it as "never answered".

The rail on a logged ticket shows the channel, when it was logged, who logged it, and how the person on the other end was identified: assigned by hand when a customer record is attached, typed by hand when it is a name and a number the agent wrote down. Neither is a verified identity, and the Helpdesk never claims it is.

Replying to a logged ticket. There is one road out: e-mail. The Reply by e-mail button works when the attached customer has an address and your brand has a support mailbox or a verified sender; the answer leaves as e-mail, and the ticket stays a phone call. When there is no road, the button is off and says in one line why. Adding notes always works.

Working the queue

The desk is three panes and fills the window – nothing here scrolls the page.

Left: the views and the queue. The views answer the three questions a desk asks all day – Mine, Unassigned, Needs reply – then status (Open, Pending, Resolved, All) and the doors work arrives through (Email, Site chat, Social, By hand). Every number beside a view is counted live, on the whole brand, not on the page you happen to be looking at.

Each row carries the customer's name, the subject, the last thing said, who owns it and how long the customer has been waiting. A 2px tick down the left edge is the channel: deep green for e-mail, soft green for site chat, brown for social, sand for anything logged by hand. The waiting time turns brown after four hours and red after a day. High priority is red, and a conversation nobody owns says Unassigned.

The queue is ordered by who has waited longest, or by newest – the control at the top right of the list also holds the agent, priority and tag filters. Search (in the header, or press /) covers the subject, e-mail, name, phone and customer number of every conversation on the brand, however far back.

Hover a row for a checkbox. Tick several and a bar appears: assign them, set their status, add a tag, or resolve them all at once.

Middle: the thread. The subject is editable – click it. The status and the assignee sit in the header, because they are what you change most; if a conversation belongs to a teammate the header says so and offers Take it.

The timeline shows four different things, and each one looks like what it is: the customer's messages as tinted cards on the left, your replies as white cards on the right with the name of whoever sent them, internal notes full-width on note paper with a dashed edge, and system events – assigned, reopened, customer attached – as one quiet line. An AI draft appears as its own card marked Draft – not sent, with Use it and Discard.

The composer has two modes. Reply is white and goes to the customer. Note turns the box to note paper and stays with the team – you can see which one you are writing before you write it. Type / for a canned reply, and Save as canned adds the current draft to the list for everyone. Send sits in the bottom corner of the box itself, with a small arrow for Send and resolve and Send and mark pending; in Note mode it reads Add note. ⌘↵ sends.

Right: the customer. Two sections you can fold away, and they stay folded next time: Customer (who they are, what they are worth, their previous conversations) and Details (priority, tags, the AI setting, the channel, when it started, who logged it, the identity level – verified, claimed, assigned by hand, typed by hand or anonymous – the language, the tone, and, once resolved and rated, the CSAT score).

The keyboard

New messages arrive on their own – an open thread grows as the customer writes, and the queue keeps its counts current without a refresh.

When a teammate has the same conversation open, you see them: their initials appear on the row in the queue, and the thread header says "Jan is here". The moment they start writing it changes to "Jan is replying…" – and if you are writing a reply too, a line inside your own composer says "Jan is already replying – check before you send." It never stops you sending; it just makes sure two people do not answer the same customer without knowing. Nobody is tracked and nothing is recorded: close the tab and you are gone from the desk.

The view and the open conversation are in the address bar, so your browser's Back button works: back out of Reporting into the queue, back out of a thread into the list. A link like /helpdesk?view=unassigned opens straight into that view, and you can send a colleague the link to a conversation.

The customer card

The Customer section of the right rail is who you are talking to, and it shows only what is actually known – nothing is padded out with blanks.

First, how to reach them and how sure we are it is them: the name, then a quiet line saying whether they signed in, whether the address is merely claimed, or whether one of your team bound this conversation to a record by hand. Under that, every handle the record carries – customer number, e-mail, phone, company. Click any of them to copy it, which is quicker than reading a customer number off a screen down a phone line. A customer with no e-mail at all is a first-class customer here: a phone number and an account number are a complete record.

Then what your data knows: lifetime spend, orders, segment and last purchase from your connected data, plus how long they have been on record, their company, and any tags on their record.

Then Previous conversations – how many there are, and the last five as one line each with the channel, the status and how long ago. Click one to open it. View all searches the queue for everything they have ever sent.

Find customer (or Change, when one is already attached) searches the brand's records the same way the New ticket form does and binds this conversation to the person – on any channel, not just the logged ones. The thread records who attached whom. Attaching never redirects a reply: on a conversation that arrived by e-mail or social, the address it arrived from stays the address you answer to.

When a high-value customer's tone turns negative, the card raises a banner – and Grant a promo lists your active promos for a one-click gesture. Grants respect suppression: a self-excluded or blacklisted identity never receives one, and the outcome lands in the thread as a note either way. Open in Customers takes you to the full record.

AI in three modes

Each conversation has an AI setting under Details:

• Observe – nothing from the AI appears in the conversation and nothing is sent. Click Suggest reply and a draft appears in your composer to edit and send. (The button is not there on a thread that holds only your own notes – there is nothing the customer wrote for a draft to answer.) While the employee is on step 1, Learning, it still writes its own reply to itself on an Observe conversation and compares it with what you sent; you never see it in the thread.
• Draft – every incoming message arrives with an AI draft already waiting in the thread. Click the draft to load it into the composer, edit, and send. Nothing is ever sent without you.
• Auto – the AI answers on its own, inside strict limits. It only answers what it can ground in the knowledge you marked For customers, your saved replies, or the conversation itself – it never guesses business facts like opening hours or prices. Sensitive requests (self-exclusion, disputes, legal language, a customer asking for a human), anything it isn't confident about, and every conversation after three automatic replies escalate to a person – with an internal note explaining why, high priority, and a draft already waiting.

Suggestions and automatic replies match the customer's language.

Hiring the support employee

Draft and Auto stay unavailable until the Autonomous Customer Support Employee works for the brand. That takes two steps, both by an administrator of your organisation:

1. Confirm the addendum in Settings › Helpdesk Agent. Read the AI Support Agent Addendum (linked from the card) and confirm it on behalf of your organisation. The confirmation is recorded – the version you confirmed, when, and who confirmed it – and the card keeps the whole history under Record.
2. Hire the employee for the brand on the Agents page, the same way you hire any other teammate. A brand has no support employee until you hire one, and pausing or archiving it there stops it for that brand at once.

Hiring it does not put it in front of a customer. It starts on the first of three steps and works its way along them, and every move is yours: it advises, you decide. It never moves itself.

1. Learning. Nothing reaches a customer and nothing appears in your conversations. For every message a customer sends, it writes the reply it would have sent, keeps it to itself, and compares it with what your team actually sent. New conversations start on Observe.
2. Copilot. Its reply is waiting in each conversation for someone on the desk to approve, edit or discard. Nothing reaches a customer without a person. New conversations start on Draft.
3. On its own, case by case. It answers by itself only for the topics an administrator has switched on, one at a time. Everything else stays in Copilot: a proposal waiting for a person. New conversations start on Auto.

The employee's profile on the Agents page shows the three steps, which one it is on, and the sentence in which it says whether it believes it is ready for the next one, with the plain numbers behind it ("in the last 30 conversations I would have answered 24 the way your team did"). Each move is a button there. Anyone who can work the brand can move it to Learning or Copilot; only an administrator can let it answer on its own. You can move it on before it says it is ready, and you can move it back at any time.

Topics are the kinds of question your customers write about – deposits, bonus terms, account verification. The employee sorts every conversation into one as it goes, and the same profile lists them with how many of its replies your team sent with little or no change. Each topic carries one switch, Answers these on its own, and the page says what it does: on, the employee answers questions of that kind by itself, without waiting for anyone; off, it writes the reply and a person on your desk approves, edits or discards it. Even with a topic on, it hands the conversation to a person when it is not sure of the answer or cannot back it with what you gave it, and always for self-exclusion, signs of harm, chargebacks and threats of legal action. Only an administrator can turn a switch on, and the switches only count on step 3 – the page tells you which step you are on and what that means for them. A topic it believes it can handle says so beside it, once your team has answered at least 15 of its replies on that topic, sent about 8 in 10 of them with little or no change, and replaced none of the last 5; that is its opinion, and the switch stays yours. A topic it is handing back to a person more often than it used to says that too. You can rename a topic, merge two that turned out to be the same thing, and add one yourself.

The setting on each conversation always wins – anyone on the desk can put one back on Observe, and only an administrator can put one on Auto. A ticket you log by hand always starts on Observe.

Two things run without the confirmation, each with its own switch in the same card, both on unless you turn them off: marking the tone of incoming messages, and Suggest a reply.

What it costs

The employee's work is charged in credits, per piece of work, from the brand it works for – so a brand's credit budget applies to it exactly as it does to everything else.

Three things follow from that, and they are all deliberate:

• Work that failed is not charged. A model that did not answer, a reply that never left, a document that turned out to hold no readable text: the credits go back. An unattended attempt that hands the case to a person instead of answering is charged as the proposal it turned out to be, not as a reply it sent.
• A page that has not changed costs nothing to look at. The weekly re-read fetches the page and compares it with what it read last time; the charge only follows a page that actually moved.
• Marking the tone of a message, the holding reply a regulated message gets, "Ask it" in the Knowledge view, answering a question yourself and correcting or retiring a passage are not charged. The last three are you fixing what the desk knows, and we are not charging you for that.

Every line appears in Usage in the customer administration area, with the brand, the person and what it was for, and a refund is its own line beside the charge it undoes.

When there are no credits left, or the brand's budget is used up, the employee stops rather than working on credit. It says so on its profile on the Agents page in its own words, a conversation it would have answered unattended goes to a person with the reason on the thread, and adding a source to Knowledge answers with the same sentence. It starts again on the next message once there are credits.

Limits and warnings. Two things stop the employee: your credits, and the credit budget you set for the brand. The daily and weekly limits under Agents › Office do not stop it unless you switch that on, under Spending on its profile. Those limits were made for agents that work on their own schedule, and a busy desk would reach a typical daily limit before lunch – a desk your customers are waiting on should not stop there. While it is off, what the employee spends is not counted towards those limits either, so it cannot use up what the brand's other agents are working within. Switch it on and the employee stops with them when a limit is reached; the page says exactly that before it changes. Under those two limits on Agents › Office, one line says which of the two is in force for the support employee, with a button to its profile – so nobody sets a ceiling believing the desk is inside it when it is not.

You are told, in the bell at the top of the page, when:

• it has stopped – no credits, the brand's budget, or (if you switched that on) an Office limit. Once a day per reason, with the reason in its own words.
• it has used 80% of an Office limit, when it is held to one, with the numbers and both ways out: raise the limit, or take it off the limits.
• the credits left will not last it long at the pace this desk is working, worked out from what its replies have cost in the last day.
• it is working again – the first piece of work it is charged for after a day it stopped on, saying what had stopped it. It is said once; if it stops again later, you are told again.

Each of these is said once a day at most. Turning alerts off under Agents › Office turns them off here too.

On the desk itself. While the employee is stopped for any of those money reasons, one line sits across the top of /helpdesk, above the queue and the conversation, saying which it is. It is there for the people with customers waiting rather than for whoever set the agents up: nobody has to open the Agents page to find out why no proposals are arriving. Anyone who can open the Agents page gets a button to the employee's profile beside it; a support seat, who cannot, is told to tell an administrator. The line disappears on its own as soon as the next piece of work is charged.

What a model sees

Before the text of a conversation reaches a model, the identifiers we know for the customer – name, e-mail address, phone number, customer number – and anything in the text that looks like an e-mail address, a phone number, a bank account or card number, a national identification number or a document number are replaced with placeholders. The values are put back on our servers when the draft returns. This is automatic and, for free text, best effort: the content of the message itself is still read.

A message that asks for self-exclusion, signals harm, mentions a chargeback or threatens legal action is never sent to a model. It goes to a person, with a short holding reply prepared for them to review.

What is kept

On brands where the agent is on, what the AI drafted is kept alongside what your team actually sent, so you can see how often the two agree. These records are kept for 24 months unless an administrator sets a different period in the card. Discard on a draft records that it was rejected. An administrator can withdraw the confirmation at any time, which stops the agent at once, and can delete what it has kept.

An optional closing sentence

If you want customers to be told that an assistant answered, the employee's profile on the Agents page has an optional closing sentence that is added to the replies it sends on its own. It is off by default and the wording is yours, per language – nothing is added until you write it and switch it on.

Knowledge

The AI answers from what you give it. Knowledge is where you give it: documents and pages, on the Helpdesk itself – the link sits beside Reporting at the bottom of the views list. Everyone who works the desk can open it, a Support seat included, because the people answering all day are the people who know what is missing.

Knowledge needs the support employee switched on for this brand: an administrator confirms the addendum in Settings › Helpdesk Agent and hires the employee for the brand on the Agents page. Until that is done, the page says so and offers nothing to add – nothing would be read and nothing kept.

What to add. Start with what your team answers from every day: your terms and conditions, the rules of a running promotion, the payment methods and their limits, the steps to verify an account, and the internal FAQ the team keeps for itself. A document is a PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, CSV or text file up to 10 MB; a page is an address on your own site. Each source is read once, cut into passages, and searched when a customer writes. Reading a source costs 2 credits, and a page that has changed costs 1 when it is read again the following week – see What it costs above.

Who may hear it. Every source is marked, and nothing is marked for you – you choose before you choose the file:

• For customers – the employee may say it to a customer, including in a reply it sends on its own.
• Internal – it helps a colleague handle the case. It can shape a draft a person reads before sending, and it is marked as internal on the desk. It is never quoted to a customer and never used in an unattended reply.

You can change the audience later. Every passage of that source follows the change, and the page says exactly that before it happens.

Valid until. A source can carry an end date – the Friday a promotion closes. After that day its passages stop being used in an answer and the source reads Expired in the list. Leave it empty when it has no end. A confidently wrong answer about a bonus that ended last week is the mistake this prevents.

Pages are read again every week, so a help-centre article you change follows on its own. Read again re-reads a source on the spot, Pause keeps it without using it, and Remove takes it and its passages away.

Ask it. The box at the top answers one question: what would the employee find for this? Type what a customer would write and you get the passages it would work from – each with its source, where in it, whether it is for customers or internal, and how close the match is. Nothing is sent to a model and nothing is answered; it is how you see what the desk does and does not know. When nothing covers the question, it says so.

Every passage, one at a time. Open a source to read what it was cut into, how often each passage has been used and when it was last used. A passage that is wrong can be corrected in place – it is read again as you save it – and one that should not be used again can be retired, and put back later.

Questions it could not answer. Above the sources, Knowledge lists the questions customers asked that your knowledge did not cover. Repeat questions fold into one row, so the list reads asked 14 times · last 38m ago rather than fourteen rows, with up to three of the conversations it was asked in, one click away. Two buttons on each: Answer it opens a box where you write the answer in general terms – no customer names or numbers – choose who may hear it exactly as you do for a document, optionally give it an end date, and save. It becomes knowledge at once and the employee answers from it on the next message. When a colleague already answered that question in one of those conversations, their words are waiting in the box for you to edit into something general, with a link to the conversation they came from. Not needed takes the question off the list and nothing else – the conversations stay where they are.

It looks before it asks. When a customer's reply leaves the desk, the question it answered and the answer are kept together for this brand, with names, addresses, phone numbers and account numbers already replaced. Nothing is sent to a model for this and it costs nothing – it is how the employee can look at how your team has answered before writing to you. Two things come of it. A question it could not answer arrives with a proposal where one exists, and the line above the box says which it is: A colleague answered this in this conversation, or A colleague answered a similar question on 12 Sep, with the conversation one click away. And a draft a person will read may lean on one of those earlier replies where nothing you have written down covers the question – marked under the draft as From a colleague's reply on 12 Sep – unconfirmed, check it still applies. An earlier reply is not knowledge: nobody approved it, it may be about one customer's case and it may be out of date. So it never grounds a reply the employee sends on its own, and the question stays on the list until somebody answers it properly.

When the employee has found an answer by itself in what you have already given it, a second list appears, Proposed by the employee. A proposed answer can shape a draft a person reads before sending; it is never used in a reply the employee sends on its own until you keep it, which asks who may hear it in the same way. Retire puts it away.

Sources under a draft. A draft the AI wrote shows what it answered from, under the text: From Bonus terms.pdf · p. 3, with an internal source marked Internal – do not quote. Click a line to open that source and check the passage before you send. The same lines appear under a suggestion in the composer and under a reply the AI sent on its own. They are for the desk – the customer never sees them.

One thing it does not do: it does not go looking for information outside what you have given it – your documents, your pages, how your own team has answered before, and the lookups you define below. It never searches the web. It answers from what is here, writes down what it could not answer, and those questions are yours to fill in.

Training: showing it how something is done

Knowledge is what you can write down. Some of what your desk knows is not written down anywhere – it is a path through a screen that somebody learned by watching a colleague do it. Training is how you show the employee that: record your screen while you do the thing, or drop in a few screenshots, and it writes down what it understood as steps for you to check.

It is on the employee's own profile, under Agents → the Autonomous Customer Support Employee → Training. Everything there is per brand, like the rest of its work.

Be honest about where this is today. What it understands is written down, versioned and kept, and it is not used in a reply or in a lookup yet. This first step exists so you can see what it makes of your own recordings before it is allowed to act on them. Nothing on the page pretends otherwise.

What to record, and how

One thing per scenario. Checking a payment's status is a scenario; everything in the back office is not. A recording that shows one path from start to finish teaches more than a long one that wanders.

• Talk while you do it. Say what you are clicking and why, and say what you are reading on each screen and what it means. The narration is what turns a sequence of clicks into steps somebody else could follow. A silent recording is the single most common reason a study comes back with nothing.
• Use a test customer. Before anything is uploaded you tick a box saying so, and it is not a formality: what is on the screen is read by an AI model, and a picture cannot be redacted the way text can. Text we send to a model has names, addresses, phone numbers and customer numbers replaced with placeholders first. A screenshot has no such thing – whatever is on it is what the model sees. So record with a test account, and if your systems have no test account, blur or cover the customer's details before you record.
• Say what it shows in one sentence when you upload it: how I find a customer's last payment in the back office and what I read there. It is what the employee is told it is watching.
• Two kinds: where to look something up (it learns the path through one of your systems) and how a case is handled (it learns what you do and what you tell the customer).

Limits, which the page also shows you: a recording of up to ten minutes and 200 MB, as mp4, mov or webm; or up to thirty screenshots of 10 MB each, as png, jpg or webp.

What it costs

A new version of a scenario costs the same as the first one. Three things follow:

• Nothing is charged when you upload. The charge is made when the study runs, on the recording's real length, so a file that turns out to be too long or the wrong kind never costs you anything.
• A study that fails is refunded in full, and the page says in plain words what went wrong. Try again puts it back in the queue; that attempt is charged when it runs, and given back in full if it fails again too.
• Reviewing, editing, answering its questions, approving and discarding cost nothing. That is you checking its work.

Reading back what it understood

When the study is done the scenario says Ready for you to review, and the review is the heart of it. On the left, the steps it wrote – each one an action, the detail behind it, the moment in the recording it was seen, and the frame it read it from. Select a step and that frame is shown large on the right.

Everything is editable, because what you approve is what is kept: the title, the one-line summary, when it applies, the system and where it starts, every step (you can rewrite them, add one, remove one and reorder them), the lines under It must never, and – for a handling scenario – what the customer is told. A frame you would rather not keep has a Remove this frame button; the picture is deleted there and then.

It also asks about whatever it was unsure of, and each question has an answer box. You can approve without answering them; the page tells you how many are still open.

Approve closes the version. From that moment it is the version the employee was trained on, it is never edited again – a change is a new version – and your recording is deleted. The frames you kept stay, because they are what the steps are checked against. Discard keeps nothing: the recording and its frames are both deleted.

Versions

Every study is a version, so what the employee was working from on any given day can be read back. The list shows each one newest first, with its state, who taught or approved it, when, and what it cost. An approved version opens read-only. If a newer version turned out to be wrong, an earlier approved one has a Make this the current version button – nothing is deleted and nothing is re-studied.

Teach a new version when the screen or the procedure changes: same title, same kind, new recording.

Before you can teach it

Training reads pictures of your systems with a model, which the earlier version of the AI Support Agent Addendum did not cover. So two things have to be true before the tab shows anything: the employee is hired for this brand, and your organisation has confirmed version 1.2 of the addendum. What you agreed to before keeps working; 1.2 is the version that adds training.

Until then the tab does not just say no. It lists what is done, with who did it and when, and gives the one thing to do next its own button – open the agreement, or open Agents and hire it. Anyone who cannot do that step themselves is told who can.

Lookups

Knowledge answers questions about your business. Lookups answer questions about one customer: where is my order, did my payment arrive, what address is on my account. Those answers are not in a document – they are on a screen in one of your own systems. A lookup is the employee opening that screen in a browser, reading it, and reporting what it found.

It exists for the systems we cannot connect to. Where there is a connection, use it. Where there is only a back office somebody signs into, this is the door.

You decide what may be looked up. The employee never browses freely. On the desk, Helpdesk → Lookups, your team defines each one: a name, the system it is in, the address it starts at, how it finds the customer (by customer number, e-mail address, phone number or name), and what to do and read once it is there – in plain words, as steps. Each one has its own switch, so a lookup can be turned off without being deleted. Support seats work here, because the people answering all day are the people who know which screen holds the answer.

Write the instructions the way you would tell a new colleague: search for the customer with the number in the box at the top; open their record and go to Orders; read the newest order – its number, the date, the amount and the status; report those four things and nothing else. A lookup that asks for one thing gives a better answer than one that tries to read a whole account.

It only reads. Every lookup is told never to save, approve, refund, send or change anything, and to stop and report that it was blocked the moment the only way forward would change something. Make that real at your end as well: give the account it runs under read-only rights. An instruction is a rule the browser follows; permissions are a rule it cannot break.

What it does depends on the stage the employee is at (the same three stages as everywhere else, on its profile under Agents):

• Learning. It says which lookup the question needs and stops there. The conversation's rail shows It would look this up: Order status with a Look it up button. Nothing runs until a person presses it.
• Copilot. It runs the lookup itself, and when the answer is back it writes the proposal with the fact in it, for a person to read and send.
• On its own. It runs the lookup itself and does not wait for anybody. It answers on its own only when the topic is one you switched on and the sender's identity is verified – somebody signed in, not somebody who typed an address into an e-mail. For anyone else the reply with the fact waits in the thread as a proposal. An account fact is exactly the thing that must not be read out to whoever claims to be that person.

Anybody working the desk can also press Look it up on any conversation at any stage, and choose which lookup to run. If the conversation carries nothing to find the customer by – no customer number, when that is how the lookup finds them – the press is refused with that sentence, and nothing is charged.

Where it runs. In a browser, under a real login, because that is what these systems need:

1. A Helpdesk open in a browser with our Chrome extension claims the lookup and runs it there, in a window of its own that nobody is working in, under that person's own logins.
2. If no such browser takes it within about three minutes, and the brand has a stored login for that system, it gets one attempt in the cloud browser.
3. If neither is available, the run ends and the desk says so plainly: nobody's browser with the extension is open. The employee never guesses the answer.

So a desk where somebody has the extension installed and the Helpdesk open is a desk where lookups happen while people work. Keeping a login stored for the system is what covers the nights.

What it read is for the desk. The result appears on the conversation, in the same note paper as an internal note, with the system it came from, the time and whose browser it ran in. It goes with the conversation when the conversation is deleted, and it reaches the customer only through a reply a person or the employee writes.

What it costs. A lookup costs 5 credits. A run that ends without an answer – it could not get in, no browser was open, you stopped it – is not charged, and one that was already charged is refunded in full.

It needs its own permission. Lookups are off until an administrator confirms the separate Account Lookups Addendum in Settings → Helpdesk Agent and switches lookups on for the brand. It is a second confirmation on top of the first one, and it is asked for separately on purpose: this is the one part of the employee's work where a model reads a page belonging to a named customer, with their real number or address in hand. Until both are done, the Lookups view says so and offers nothing else.

Ratings

When a conversation is resolved, the customer is asked to rate it 1–5 – inline in the site chat (in their language), or by email with one-click rating links. One ask per conversation, ever. Scores appear in the rail and flow into your warehouse alongside spend and lifecycle data.

Support seats

Invite teammates with the Support role (Organization → Team). A support seat sees only the Helpdesk – no campaigns, data, or settings – which makes it safe to staff the queue without opening the rest of your workspace.

A support seat can log tickets, search the brand's customers and attach one to a conversation. It cannot create a customer record – that stays with owners, admins and managers, like everywhere else in the product. A support agent who meets someone new logs the call with their name and number, and whoever manages customers creates the record afterwards.

Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Reddit comments and messages

With Instagram, Facebook, YouTube or Reddit connected, comments under your posts land in the Helpdesk as conversations, next to your e-mail, and so do direct messages on Instagram, Facebook and Reddit. Each thread names the person by their handle, and a comment thread shows the post it belongs to with a link. Reply under the comment; on Instagram and Facebook you can also switch to "In a DM" to answer the commenter privately. A message thread answers in the message thread. Meta allows support answers outside a 24-hour window, not marketing; Reddit chats are text only.

Listening on Reddit. Press Listening on the Helpdesk and give it the phrases people use when they look for what you sell, and optionally the communities to watch. Every couple of hours new threads that match land in the Helpdesk as "Reddit thread" conversations, with the thread as the message and a drafted reply from your Social Media Manager. Nothing is ever posted on its own – you send it, edit it, or leave it – and a sent reply appears as a public comment from your account. Check now runs the search on the spot.

If your AI team has a Social Media Manager, it drafts the reply in your voice the moment a thread arrives – send it, edit it, or write your own. When the team is trusted to publish on its own, it answers on its own too, with the same limits as e-mail: sensitive requests are handed to a person, and after three answers in a row a person takes over. In chat, "what's waiting on Instagram?" lists the threads, and "reply to Lena that we do support Shopify" sends the reply you approve. Comment-to-DM automations ("comment LINK and I'll send it") can be set from chat as well.