# Agent Support

> Live human-handoff support chat — and how it can run on your store on its own, without the Shopping Assistant switched on.

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_enabled` switch 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](./serving-behavior.md)).

## 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](./quick-start.md); enabling Agent Support in the dashboard is
all that is needed for it to appear.