Guide
Adjust how your agent answers: tone, languages and instructions
Change your agent’s tone, languages, instructions, handoff to a person and the details it asks for, and bring back an earlier version if you need to.
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- 8 min read
In this article
How your agent answers is decided in two tabs of its page: Behaviour (tone, languages, AI model, instructions, handoff and leads) and Profile (name, business, contact details and opening hours). What you change applies when you press Save changes, on all its channels, and every save is kept as a version you can restore.
Before you change anything
- Role. To change something you need the Member, Admin or Owner role. With Read only you can view both tabs but not change them.
- Saving. While you edit, “You have unsaved changes” appears (on a small screen, “Unsaved”). Press Save changes to apply them or Discard to go back to what was there. Every text field shows a counter with its maximum number of characters.
Tone and personality
- Tone: how it sounds when it writes. Friendly is warm, on first-name terms, and the most common; Professional is clear and direct; Formal uses polite address; Casual is colloquial; Enthusiastic is energetic and made for selling.
- Personality: the traits that make it recognisable. One or two sentences are enough, for example: “Warm and practical, like the head waiter. Gets to the point and always suggests the next step.”
Languages
- Languages it answers in: there are 15 to choose from (Spanish, Catalan, English, Galician, Basque, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Dutch, Romanian, Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Ukrainian). How many each agent can have depends on your plan. The counter shows it and, once you reach the maximum, the others appear locked: remove one to pick another. The agent needs at least one language.
- Default language: the agent starts in it and falls back to it when it cannot tell the customer’s language.
- Detect the customer’s language: when it is on, the agent answers in the language each customer writes in, among the ones you picked. With a single language, the agent always answers in it.
Worth knowing:
- The agent never answers in a language that is not on its list. If someone writes in another one, it uses the default.
- A very short message, such as “hello” or “ok”, does not change the language of the conversation.
- Automatic detection does not tell Dutch or Romanian apart. If you mostly serve customers in one of them, set it as the Default language.
- The language of the buttons and notices of your website chat is chosen separately, in the Widget tab: see customise the look of your website chat.
AI model
The model is what writes the replies. Automatic, marked as Recommended, uses the model iAgentify recommends and moves with it when it is improved. The others are grouped as Economy, Balanced, Advanced and Premium, and each one shows how many credits a reply uses.
A model your plan does not include appears locked, with a notice that starts with “Not included in the”. During the free trial, the ones you cannot use yet show “Not available during the trial”. See what uses credits.
Instructions
Write as you would explain the job to a new colleague: full sentences and concrete cases.
| Field | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Sales instructions | What to offer, how to handle prices and where to take the customer |
| Support instructions | How to solve questions and issues from existing customers |
| Conversation rules | Limits that always apply: what not to say, how to answer, what to stay away from |
- A rule is obeyed even if the knowledge says otherwise. If you write “do not talk about prices”, the agent gives no prices even when they are on your website.
- Instructions say how to act, not what it knows. What the agent knows about your business comes from its profile and its knowledge: see add knowledge.
Handoff to a person
This is where you decide when the agent stops answering and passes the conversation to your team.
- Allow handoff to a person: when it is on, the agent hands over when the customer asks or one of your rules applies, and your team gets the notification. It is on in a new agent.
- When to hand over: the situations where it must hand over even if the customer does not ask. For example, a complaint, or a customer who repeats the same question twice.
- Handoff message: what the customer reads when the agent hands over. Leave it empty and the agent writes it.
After a handoff, the agent does not answer in that conversation again until someone on your team presses Return to the AI under Conversations: see take over a conversation. The notification goes to owners, admins and members, in the app and by email, according to what each of them has chosen under Settings › Notifications.
With handoff off, the agent handles every conversation to the end. If a customer asks to talk to you, it gives the Contact details from the profile. Your team can still take over by hand from the inbox.
Lead capture
- Capture contact details: when it is on, the agent asks for the details naturally when it detects interest and saves them under Leads. When it is off, it does not ask for contact details.
- Details it asks for: each detail has a Label, a Key (the name it is stored under), a Type (Short text, Email, Phone or Long text) and the Required box. The agent asks in the order of the list, which you change with the arrows. Press Add detail to add another: the counter shows how many you have, up to 10.
A new agent asks for three details, with the keys name, email and phone: name and email required, phone optional. The app uses those three keys to fill in the name, email and phone of each lead, so do not change them. In general, avoid changing a key once you have leads.
For a lead to be saved, the customer has to give a valid email or a phone number: keep at least one of those two details on the list. What happens to each lead afterwards is in leads: what your agent collects.
Profile: name, business, contact details and opening hours
The Profile tab holds what the agent knows about your business even when it has no knowledge source.
| Section | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Agent | Agent name: the name it introduces itself with to your customers |
| Business | Business name, Industry, Website and Business description. It uses them to introduce itself and give context to its answers |
| Contact | Email, Phone, WhatsApp, Contact page and Address. This is what it gives when a customer asks to talk to you or where you are |
| Opening hours | Time zone and the hours of each day, or Always open |
A new agent comes with Always open switched on. Switch it off to give your hours: turn on each day you open and choose when it opens and closes. Press Slot to add another time slot on the same day (morning and afternoon, for example) and use Copy to Monday–Friday or Copy to every day so that you do not have to repeat it.
The agent answers at any hour: with the opening hours it knows when you are open, and your website chat can show a message outside them. You write that message in the Widget tab.
Pause, activate, duplicate or delete the agent
| Action | What happens |
|---|---|
| Pause | The agent becomes Paused: it stops answering on the website, WhatsApp and Instagram until you resume it, and the chat stops showing on your website. None of its configuration is lost. Messages that arrive on WhatsApp and Instagram are still stored under Conversations |
| Resume or Activate | The agent becomes Active and answers on its channels. Activate is the button on agents that are a Draft |
| Duplicate | Creates a copy as a Draft, with the same name followed by “(copy)”. It carries the configuration, the look of the chat, the allowed domains and as many knowledge sources as fit within your plan’s source limit. Channels are not copied, and the copy counts as one more agent in your plan |
| Delete agent | It stops answering and its WhatsApp and Instagram channels are disconnected. Its conversations and leads are kept; its knowledge is deleted with it. This cannot be undone |
Duplicate and Delete agent are in the More actions menu on the agent’s page. Deleting is reserved for the Admin and Owner roles. An agent that is paused or a draft can still be configured and tested.
Versions: going back to an earlier configuration
The Versions tab keeps the history of the configuration. A version is created every time you save the profile or the behaviour, and also when you activate or pause the agent. The widget and the knowledge are not part of versions.
Open Agents › your agent › Versions. The list shows when each version was saved and who saved it. The one in use carries the Current label.
Press Restore on the version you want back.
Confirm with Restore version. A notice appears with the number of the restored version and that of the new one.
Restoring deletes nothing: the configuration you bring back is saved as a new version, and the one you had stays in the history.
After each change, check it in the Playground tab: see test your agent.
Related articles
- Create your first agent step by stepCreate your account, complete the three steps of “New agent” (your business, tone and languages, knowledge) and see what is left before it starts answering.
- Test your agent and read the diagnostics of each replyWrite to it as a customer would in the Playground tab and see in Diagnostics which sources it uses, how confident it is, what it is missing and what each reply costs.
- Take over a conversation and return it to the AIHow to reply to a customer yourself, what they notice on each channel and how to pause, resolve or return the conversation to the agent. The AI does not come back on its own.
- Leads: what your agent collects and where to find itWhat a lead is, how the agent and the chat form create one, which details are saved and how to follow up, edit or delete it on the Leads screen.