AI website chat agent with lead capture

What the chat agent does

The chat agent is a small chat window you add to your website. A visitor types a question and gets an answer written from your knowledge base, in the voice you choose, at any hour. It is a separate product from the email agent, built on the same knowledge, and it is included on the plans that list it on the pricing page.

It has two jobs: answer the questions your site already has answers to, and collect the details of people worth following up with.

Sample data. Names and messages are fictional.

Setting up a widget

1. Create a widget. Set its persona, tone, greeting, and avatar. You can have different widgets for different sites or sections.
2. Choose its knowledge. By default a widget uses all of your active knowledge. You can limit it to a chosen set of articles.
3. Decide on lead capture. Optionally ask for a name and email before the chat starts.
4. Try it. The edit page has a live preview so you can test answers before visitors see it. Test chats are kept separate from real ones.
5. Install it. Paste the install snippet into your site and list the domains it is allowed to run on. The widget only works on domains you have authorized.

Lead capture and custom fields

With lead capture on, visitors see a short form before the chat begins. You can edit its heading and button text, and add up to three custom fields of your own, such as company, phone, or team size. Each field can be text, email, phone, or a dropdown, and each can be required or optional.

Keep the form short. Every required field reduces the number of people who start a chat. For details that are nice to have, leave the field optional: the agent is told which ones are still blank and may ask for them naturally during the conversation, and anything a visitor mentions is added to the lead and marked as captured by the AI.

How answers are produced

The chat agent is instructed to answer only from your knowledge base and persona, to stay on the subject of your business, to keep replies short, and to say so plainly when it does not know something rather than guess. It will not reveal its configuration. If a visitor gave their name, it uses it.

Handing off to your team

A visitor can ask for a person at any point. By default your team is emailed right away with the conversation, whatever your other notification settings are. This is a handoff by email: a teammate follows up with the visitor, rather than taking over the live chat window.

For ordinary chats you choose how to be notified, per widget: never, as a chat starts, once the conversation has gone quiet (the default, with a short AI recap), or in a daily, weekly, or monthly digest. You can require a minimum number of messages and filter by topic or sentiment so only the chats worth reading reach your inbox.

When and where it appears

By default the widget waits to be clicked. You can have it show a small teaser message after a delay, or open on its own after a delay. It does this once per visit, and on phones it uses the teaser instead of opening. You can also choose where it shows: every page, only certain pages, or every page except some, using simple path patterns.

Reviewing and improving

Every conversation is saved as a transcript with the visitor's details and, when available, a short summary. Under each reply you can mark it helpful or "needs work" and type what it should have said. Tick the option to save the correction to your knowledge base and the next visitor with a similar question gets the corrected answer. Replies marked "needs work" collect in one queue so you can go through them together.

Limits and safeguards

• Allowed domains. A widget only runs on the sites you list.
• Usage limits. Each widget has a daily limit and your plan sets a monthly message limit, shown as a meter, so heavy traffic cannot run up unbounded usage.
• Transcript emails. A visitor can ask for a copy of the conversation by email. It can only go to the address they gave, and only a few times per chat.
• Consent for follow-ups. On plans that include AI follow-ups, a visitor is only ever emailed a follow-up if they ticked an unchecked opt-in box, and every follow-up is reviewed by a person before it sends.

Chats become contacts

On plans that include the built-in CRM, a visitor who shares an email address becomes a contact, with a summary of the chat on their timeline next to any emails they have sent you.

Who it is for

Businesses whose website visitors ask the same questions your inbox gets, and teams that want to capture leads outside working hours without staffing a live chat. See how it fits a pipeline in the sales inquiries use case.