# 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)).

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