---
title: "Support Agents"
description: "An agent for your product, inside your own site, with inbox handoff."
source: https://hiy.ai/docs/support-agents
---

# Support Agents

> **Early access.** Grounding and honest gaps are on every plan, always. Instant handoffs and token gating come with Support Agents — part of Founding, and free during your 14-day trial. Resolution analytics, helpdesk integrations and admin controls are on the [roadmap](/roadmap).

Your public twin speaks as you. A **Support Agent** speaks for something you own — your product — inside your own site or app.

It answers in a neutral voice from the product knowledge you give it, never sells, and when it can't answer it does the one thing bad support bots don't: it says so, and offers to pass the question to a person. The visitor leaves an email and the question lands in the agent's **Inbox** tab **immediately** — a handoff means someone is stuck right now, so it's recorded whatever your notification settings say. What doesn't happen yet is the push: sending email isn't switched on, so neither you nor the visitor is mailed about it. Check the Inbox and nobody dead-ends.

Each handoff opens the conversation that produced it, so you can see everything the agent tried before it gave up rather than replying to one line of context. That view is never behind a plan on a Support Agent: a handoff you can't read has dead-ended, which is the one thing this agent promises not to do. See [Where a lead came from](/docs/conversations).

When it hands over, who that reaches and what the visitor reads are yours to set on the agent's **Escalation** page — including turning handover off altogether. See [Handing over to a person](/docs/escalation).

## Your team can read it, not run it

Support rarely has one owner. Invite a colleague into your organisation (an
invite is just an email address — see [Team Agents](/docs/team-agents)) and they
can sign in, find the agent in their twin switcher under **Shared with you**,
and open its Inbox: every handoff, every person waiting, and the whole
conversation behind each one.

That is the entire grant. An invited colleague can read; they cannot change the
agent's knowledge, voice or rules, cannot publish it or see its token settings,
cannot mark a follow-up done or delete anything, and cannot touch billing.
Those stay with the account that created the agent. Full shared administration
is on the [roadmap](/roadmap), and this is not it.

## It opens with a token your server mints

A Support Agent has no public link. A visitor gets in through a **signed token your own server mints** — your site vouches for its visitors, which is why they never need hiy accounts. The address exists only so your dashboard and your snippet can name it, and asking for it without a token returns the same "not found" a made-up slug does.

Setting it up is three steps:

1. **Copy your signing secret** — It's on the agent's **Publish** tab.

2. **Mint a token per page view on your server** — The exact code is on that page.

3. **Drop the widget snippet** — Bubble or inline — with the token.

**Warning:** Keep the secret server-side, always. If it ever leaks, tell us and we'll rotate it.

## Four presets, one agent

When you create a Support Agent you choose a **preset** — a named setup rather than a different kind of agent. There is one Support Agent underneath, answering under exactly the same rules whichever you pick, and everything a preset sets is yours to change afterwards on the **Rules**, **Lists** and **First impression** tabs.

**The first preset is preselected, and shown open.** Its scope line — what it
will and won't answer — is on screen the moment you land on this step, so
you're reading a real choice rather than guessing. One click swaps it for
another, and the next screen shows exactly what your pick set.

Each preset does three things: it adds the [lists](/docs/records) that setup usually needs, it writes down [what the agent covers](/docs/what-it-answers) so it declines everything else plainly, and it seeds a starting [greeting](/docs/first-impression) and a starting [handover sentence](/docs/escalation) — both yours to edit before anyone sees them.

| Preset | Starts from | Scope it declares |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **SaaS product support** | Known issues, Common questions | How your product behaves — setup, limits, troubleshooting |
| **Orders & billing** | Products, Common questions | Plans, prices, orders, refunds and cancellations |
| **Docs/developer assistant** | Common questions, Resources | Your API and docs — endpoints, limits, error codes |
| **Careers/HR** | Open positions, Common questions | Open roles, and how to apply |

A preset changes no rule. It does not make the agent sell, loosen what it will answer, or unlock anything — the neutral voice, the token gating and the honest gap are the same either way. If your org already has one of those lists, the preset reuses it rather than making a second copy, and if you are already at the limit of eight lists it attaches what exists and leaves the rest to you.

Prefer to start empty? **Start from scratch** sits on the same list as a peer choice, not a fallback: no categories, no declared scope, no opening line — you add all of it yourself.

## Turning it on

A Support Agent is a draft until you publish it, and it answers nobody until
then — not even through a valid token. The control is on its **Publish** tab,
beside the wiring steps, and on Overview. Unpublishing is immediate and acts
only on the agent you are looking at; your own public twin and every other
agent carry on untouched.

Publishing hands you the agent's own version of the [launch
kit](/docs/sharing): who can reach it in one sentence, the widget snippet with
the place your token goes, and a way back to the signing secret. No public
link, no QR code and no ready-made posts — a Support Agent has no public page
for any of them to point at.

### See it answer, before you write any server code

A Support Agent only answers through a token your own server mints, which
leaves a real gap: there's no way to watch it work until that server exists.
**See it answer**, on the Publish tab, closes it.

The button appears once the twin has something to answer from — with nothing
imported or pasted yet there is nothing to watch, so it isn't offered. Once
your agent is live, pressing it opens the launch kit, and **See it answer**
inside that panel mints a short-lived token and mounts the real widget right
there. It's a ten-minute token, and never one you can copy or paste, so it
can't be mistaken for one to drop into your own site. Before it's live — most
Support Agents queue briefly for [identity
review](#review-before-it-answers) — the same button opens [Test
chat](/docs/testing) instead, which already answers for real and needs no
token at all.

A new Support Agent starts on [**Strict** scope](/docs/what-it-answers): it
answers what your material supports and declines the rest plainly, because a
confident guess about your own product is the most expensive kind of wrong.
That is a starting point, not a rule — change it on the Rules tab whenever you
like.

## What it knows

Only what you give it, exactly like your own twin: paste docs, import your help site, add corrections. It quotes limits and steps verbatim, cites its sources, and never guesses at how your product behaves — an invented answer about your own product is the most expensive kind of wrong.

Give it a *Known issues* list and it can look up what's broken right now and say what the workaround is.

## It shares your monthly allowance

A second agent does not come with a second allowance. Your plan's visitor
messages are one pool for the whole account, and every twin and agent you own
draws from it — so adding this one divides the month rather than doubling it.
The meter on your Overview and in **Settings → Plan & billing** counts it that way.
See [Plans and billing](/docs/plans-and-billing).

## Review before it answers

The same identity rule applies: you twin yourself, or something you own — confirmed at creation, and checked again on our side. A Support Agent whose name could belong to a person is checked by a human before it can answer — so "Acme Support" clears quickly, usually within one business day, and "Ask Sarah" always waits for a person to look at it. That's deliberate.

The decision shows on your dashboard — don't wait on your inbox: it reads **Awaiting review** while it waits, turns Live when it clears, and if it's declined it says so with the reviewer's reason and what to send us, for as long as that's the state. You can keep testing and adding material the whole time.