Short answer
In Aide, one agent answers your website chat, support email and Zendesk, Gorgias or Front inboxes with the same knowledge, order tools, procedures and handoff rules, each place switched on separately. Your team sees a customer's conversations from every channel in one timeline.- Where it answers
- Aide Chat, support email, and Zendesk, Gorgias or Front inboxes.
- Shared everywhere
- Knowledge, topics, procedures, order tools and handoff rules.
- Switched on
- Per chat widget, support address or helpdesk inbox, one agent each.
- Sent in helpdesks
- Email in Zendesk and Front. Live chat and email in Gorgias.
- Customer history
- Every conversation from one email address, as one timeline.
In many AI support setups, each channel gets its own bot, with its own knowledge, its own rules and its own idea of when to call a person. A return policy changes and someone updates it in three places. A customer who chatted on Tuesday and emails on Thursday starts over.
Aide runs one agent across every channel. You write the knowledge, procedures and handoff rules once, then decide channel by channel where the agent answers.
Where the agent answers
The agent's page has a Where it answers tab listing your chat widgets, support addresses and helpdesk inboxes, each with its own switch. Switch a place on and the agent answers there. Switch it off and your team handles it as before.
- Each row says what Aide does in that place: sends replies, writes drafts for your team instead (and why), or only watches while the inbox is being tried out.
- Each place has one agent. If you run two agents, say one per brand, moving a place from one to the other asks you to confirm first.
- Nothing switches on by itself. Deploying an agent turns on no place and never pauses another agent. A new chat widget, or a helpdesk inbox Aide discovers, gets your most recently deployed agent, and a helpdesk inbox only watches until you take it live. A new support address starts without an agent.
What stays the same
The point of one agent is that a rule written once holds everywhere.
- Knowledge. The same articles, website pages, help center content and Shopify products ground every answer.
- Topics. Every customer message is classified against your own topics, and the topic's AI level decides how far Aide goes, on any channel.
- Procedures. They run on chat, email and helpdesk conversations alike, so "orders older than 14 days go to the Claims team" holds wherever the customer writes, unless a procedure's Only if limits it to one channel. Hand-off rules are procedures too.
- Order tools. Aide acts on a Shopify order only for a customer who proves it is theirs. In chat, that means being logged in, or an order number plus the matching email. On email, Aide acts only on orders placed with the address the email came from; an order number typed into the message isn't enough.
- Handoff rules. The same settings apply, and a customer who asks for a person reaches your team.
What changes by channel
The agent writes for the channel it's on, and some channels get drafts rather than sent replies.
| Where | What Aide does once live |
|---|---|
| Aide Chat | Answers in the chat, with product cards, order and tracking cards |
| Support email | Answers in full paragraphs with the agent's signature; waits 30 seconds by default so two emails in a row get one reply |
| Zendesk | Answers email tickets; drafts internal notes on messaging, chat and SMS tickets |
| Gorgias | Answers live chat and email, and contact forms by email; internal notes on SMS, messaging and social |
| Front | Answers email; drafts on chat, SMS, messaging and custom-channel inboxes |
Each place is tested before it goes live. A helpdesk inbox moves from Watch only, where Aide drafts inside Aide and writes nothing to the helpdesk, to test senders, to a share of conversations, to everyone. A support address can run in shadow first, where Aide writes each reply as a private note and sends nothing. Starting from a helpdesk? See how to add AI to your helpdesk.
One customer, one timeline
When a teammate opens a conversation, the details panel lists the customer's other conversations, newest first. Conversations from the same email address appear together, whether they came in by email, Aide Chat, Zendesk, Gorgias or Front.
Each entry shows the subject, when it was last active, the channel, its status and its topic, with open conversations standing out from closed ones. Selecting one opens it without losing your place in the view you were working.
So the teammate answering an email about order #1042 sees that the same customer chatted about it on Tuesday, and that a colleague already has an open conversation with them. Analytics can be filtered by channel too, and usage lists AI replies per channel.
People come first
On every channel, a teammate who steps in takes over. Once a teammate is assigned to an email thread or takes it over, Aide stops replying there. In Gorgias, Aide only drafts once a teammate has replied.
Work across the queue follows the same pattern. A new procedure can run on conversations already waiting on any channel, and handoffs, missed SLA targets and orders waiting for approval can post to Slack.