Much has changed since we last spoke about live chat. There have been several feature developments in our chat tool: Beacon by Help Scout is a customizable conversation window on your site that offers up to four options: email contact form, Help Docs, AI Agent, and human live chat. See ours at SellerSmile.com. With Beacon, your customers will have access to instant assistance without the hassle of having to dig around, or call in to wait on hold.
Four Options for Faster Support
1. Email contact form
We usually have to wait for an email response, but submitting a question only takes a few moments.
When there are no agents available or when other options are not configured or disabled, Beacon turns into an accessible contact form to connect your customer to the support team.
2. Help Documents
Public articles about your store and its policies are the crux of good self-serve support. Help Scout does an excellent job with their Docs Site feature in helping us create public and private knowledge bases for humans, customers, and the AI agent to reference. Help Scout Docs have collections which have categories which have articles. SellerSmile would create and manage your articles as a source of truth to power the knowledge base and calibrate the responses of the AI agent.
We can create, style, and configure a comprehensive public and private Docs knowledge base for that match current policies and procedures, offering pubic articles to your customers through Beacon and/or a public Support page.
3. Human Live Agent
Human live chat can be preferred and sometimes more useful than AI or search options. For instance, we’ve managed live chat during live events, special promotional releases, or larger sales.
4. AI Agent
Using OpenAI, Help Scout has a feature to create an AI agent that responds to customer queries, it references and trains on your help articles, FAQs, website pages, and other materials.
We can configure and enable this AI agent to provide instant and authoritative responses to your customers and they’ll be reliably directed to the relevant piece of reference information. When there is confusion, your AI agent will offer the customer to escalate to a human agent when it has not resolved the concern, and that contact comes to the same Help Scout inbox. We include a separate report on your AI agent’s activity and success.
Start and test AI
Our recommendation would be to add a Beacon all sites: each with a Help Docs site integrated with an AI agent, and test. Over time, we can see how many interact with AI and always revert to the knowledge base with the AI agent.
Read: Get Started With AI Answers by Help Scout.
How to Add Beacon to My Site
Beacon is added to your website as a snippet of JavaScript code installed above the <body> in your website’s source code. We can install Beacon and configure it right away, as part of your current SellerSmile service. Read more about how we Add Beacon to Your Website or App.
More options for different preferences
Increasing the methods available to customers to help themselves is common sense. Younger generations prefer self service, and it reduces Resolution Time and the number of conversations humans must actively manage.
Let SellerSmile build your Support
Excited to help you get started with self-serve and AI agents, or to have a deeper conversation about how to best support your customers.
Let’s partner to build a spectacular customer experience: Book a free call with SellerSmile today!


