Support escalation in the AI chat
Worth saying plainly up front: ShopGuide's storefront chat is an AI agent, not a human-staffed live chat. There's no queue of support agents answering your customers in real time. What it does have is a built-in escalation path — when the AI can't fully help someone, it hands them to a real contact channel you control.
This page covers that handoff, and separately, where you go for help with ShopGuide itself.
How the handoff works
The chat agent has a contact_support tool it reaches for when it can't answer a question or resolve a problem. Its instructions are direct: be honest that it can't help further, and use the tool right away rather than promising to "forward this" and not following through. You pick the destination channel in Settings → Essentials → Support Channel:
- Email — the AI asks for the customer's email, then sends your team a summary of the question, including any order number, urgency, and conversation context
- Slack — same flow, delivered to a webhook you configure, optionally with a custom message template
- WhatsApp — a click-to-chat button pre-filled with a summary, so the customer can pick up the conversation directly with your team on WhatsApp — no email required
If none of these are set up yet, the AI tells the customer the store hasn't configured support and points them to the website instead.
Escalation usually happens one of two ways: the customer explicitly asks for help with something broken or an order problem, or the AI simply can't answer a product or shop question — which doubles as lead capture, since a name and email often get collected along the way.
These conversations, along with related patterns across your store, also feed the knowledge gaps list, so recurring unanswered topics stay visible even if nobody's reading every transcript.
What the AI handles without escalating
Separately from handoff, the AI can manage a fair amount on its own if you turn it on in Settings → General → Order Features: looking up order status and shipping info, and — if order editing is also enabled — canceling items or changing a shipping address. Disable these and order-related requests route straight to contact_support instead.
Getting help with ShopGuide itself
If you need help with your own setup — installation, configuration, billing — reach out through the contact details you gave during onboarding, or through your plan's support terms; higher-tier plans include priority support from the ShopGuide team. See Plans & subscription pricing.