Setting AI Agents up across multiple channels

One of the most useful features of Jotform AI Agents is their flexibility: Your agent can interact with customers across multiple channels and on various platforms. The channels feature helps your brand meet customers anywhere they’d like to interact. 

You can access most of these channels from the Build page (as mentioned in Chapter 2). This chapter will expand on these options and how to easily access them in the Publish page of the AI Agent Builder. The Publish page’s sidebar shows various channels and sharing options.

Standalone

The standalone interface is mostly what we’ve used throughout the examples in this book. It’s perfect for focused conversations between your customers and your AI Agent that occur outside of your website or app.

The Standalone window lets you share your agent using a direct link to the agent’s conversational interface. You can also send email invitations linking to your agent, share your agent on your social media platforms, and generate a QR code linking to it.

Select Settings in the Standalone window to control your agent’s access settings — private, public, or organization-only (the Company Access option is only available on Enterprise accounts, however).

The Standalone window also includes embed code you can use to embed your agent into your website. There are five different embed styles you can choose from. The Page Embed and Chatbot embed styles also have additional customization options.

Selecting Preview lets you check out what each method will look like.

Chatbot Agent

The Chatbot Agent format lets you embed your agent directly in your website as a chatbot, offering customers quick and easy support as they browse your page.

A Chatbot Agent is super handy for providing instant responses, offering quick assistance, and guiding users through forms. Chatbot agents are easy to customize to fit your brand. They can be embedded on landing pages, contact forms, and anywhere else on your site.

The Chatbot Agent window lets you copy an embed code to easily add your agent to your website. Here, you can also control your agent’s greeting, when it displays, and where it appears.

Quick Preview lets you see how your chatbot will look to users.

Phone Agent

A really useful way to leverage your agent is to have it interact with your customers as a phone agent. The Phone Agent option allows you to field customer service calls, take orders, or provide general brand information. You can purchase a designated phone number for your agent’s interactions ($10 per number, per month).

The Phone Agent window lets you customize the voice, tone, and identity of your agent to match your brand. Simply select Voice Settings to choose your preferred options and hear how they’ll sound.

You can also test your agent’s responses by making test phone calls — just dial the phone number shown and enter the displayed extension. Be advised that if you’ve linked a form with your agent, some types of form fields may be incompatible with the phone functionality.

Voice Agent

Use the Voice Agent window to enable your agent to accept direct web calls alongside chat interactions. Select Voice Settings to easily customize your agent’s speaking voice, including accent, gender, and age.

Your customers can easily start a voice conversation with your agent by selecting the Talk to Agent button from the agent’s chat interface — no additional software or phone number is needed.

When you’re happy with the voice settings, share a simple link to your agent, or copy the embed code to embed your agent in your website. Choose from five appearance options. For example, my voice agent as a Lightbox embed looks like this.

SMS Agent

The SMS Agent feature allows your customers to have text conversations with your agent. This channel is handy since we’re all used to texting, but be advised that you’ll need to purchase a designated number for your agent, and some form fields are also unsupported over SMS.

If you purchase a phone number for your agent to accept phone calls, you can use it for SMS messages as well.

WhatsApp Agent

If you’re one of the millions of businesses on WhatsApp, you can now easily deploy a Jotform AI Agent as a WhatsApp Agent to provide 24-7 support to your customers.

The WhatsApp Agent window lets you connect your agent with your WhatsApp account. This is an easy way to reach your customers on a platform they’re already used to.

Messenger Agent

You can also connect your agent with Messenger to let customers directly engage with your agent through that platform. Similar to the WhatsApp option, just link your account via this window.

Platforms

The Platforms window lets you easily add your agent to a variety of external platforms, including Wix, Shopify, and WordPress. Just select your desired platform, choose your preferred embed style, and copy the code.

Agent App

Smartphone apps have become the way we do business with brands, plan outings, order food, and more. So when your customers have questions, why not have your organization’s agent be available to personally chat with them through an app as well?

The benefits of converting your AI Agent into an app include

• Making your agent instantly available directly from users’ mobile devices
• Elevating customer interactions with 24-7 availability right from their phones
• Improving customer satisfaction through your agent’s knowledge and expertise, accessible the way customers are used to accessing information
• Raising customer engagement by meeting users where they’re at — on the devices they use every day

With Jotform’s Agent App feature, you can customize your app’s icon, name, splash screen, and push notifications to create a distinctive experience. Let’s take a quick walk though.

The Agent App window lets you instantly turn your agent into a downloadable app. Choose from the options to customize the app’s icon, name, and splash screen, and choose how you’d like to share the app. Preview your app’s appearance in real time in the Agent App Preview sidebar.

Name your app and set the app icon in the App Icon & Name screen.

Splash Screen allows you to adjust how the app appears when a customer first opens it.

In Push Notifications, you can also elect to send notifications to anyone who’s downloaded your app — just another way of extending good customer service to your audience, while extending the customer reach of your brand.

Your AI Agent is separate from apps created in Jotform Apps. The Agent App publishing method lets you share your agent as a progressive web app (PWA), essentially a website that can be installed like an app on a user's device. It can work offline and still save user data.