Agent Support
Agent Support is a first-party live support chat: shoppers reach a real person, your team claims and answers conversations from the dashboard inbox, and everything stays inside your store. It is a separate capability from the Shopping Assistant — you can run either one, or both.
There are two distinct things people sometimes both call "support", and only one of them is Agent Support:
- Agent Support (this page) is the live, human-handoff support chat — a shopper
talks to a real agent. It is what the
agent_support_enabledswitch controls. - FAQ answering is the Shopping Assistant reading your support knowledge to answer policy and how-to questions in conversation. That lives inside an assistant turn, so it only runs when the Shopping Assistant is on — it is not part of standalone Agent Support.
Running support on its own
Agent Support does not need the Shopping Assistant. When Agent Support is enabled and the Shopping Assistant is switched off (or not yet set up), the embed mounts a lightweight support launcher on its own: shoppers see a small floating button that opens the same support-chat panel — start a conversation, get claimed by an agent, exchange messages, and close — without the assistant ever loading.
When the Shopping Assistant is switched on, support is reached through the assistant instead, so the standalone launcher stays dormant and support is never shown twice.
The standalone launcher is gated strictly on your published configuration: it appears only when Agent Support is explicitly enabled for your store. If the flag is unset or off, no support surface is added — the same fail-closed default that governs every shopper-facing surface (see how serving behaves).
The inbox
You claim and answer conversations from the Agent Support inbox in your dashboard. Access to the inbox is controlled by your team's support permissions, independently of whether the Shopping Assistant is on.
Install
There is nothing extra to install. The standalone launcher rides the same one-line embed snippet from the quick start; enabling Agent Support in the dashboard is all that is needed for it to appear.