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_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).

Handing off to an existing support widget

If you already run a support chat — Dixa, Zendesk, Intercom, Freshchat, or any other — Agent Support can hand off to it instead of opening the poneva inbox. Choose Existing support widget as the handoff provider and the widget's support actions (the header Support button and any in-conversation handoff button) open your widget rather than ours.

You don't add any code. poneva inspects your live storefront, detects which support widget you run, and generates a small connector for it that runs inside Shop AI. The connector is stored with your assistant configuration; there is no snippet to paste and nothing to maintain on your side.

Once connected, the shopper experience is:

• Your support widget's own launcher is hidden, so Shop AI is the single support entry point — your widget never floats on its own.
• Tapping Support opens your widget and fully hides Shop AI — no launcher, no panel — so only one support surface shows at a time.
• When the shopper closes your widget, Shop AI returns to its side launcher, exactly as on first page load; it does not pop the chat panel back open.

This works for any widget poneva can detect and drive through its public web SDK — for example Dixa (_dixa_.invoke('setWidgetOpen', …) / on-widget-open-changed) and Zendesk messaging (zE('messenger', 'open') / messenger:on 'close'). The per-merchant connector lives in your configuration, not in poneva's shared code, so a new support tool is supported without a poneva release.

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.