Understanding Tools

You will learn

What tools are, what they do, and how they fit alongside skills and content. By the end, you’ll know when a tool is the right building block and when to reach for something else.

Note: Customer Agent comes with tools out of the box. Creating fully custom tools from scratch is currently in closed beta. If you’re not in the beta, you won’t see a dedicated Tools page — but the tools that come with Customer Agent still run behind the scenes when skills use them. You can see the tools a skill uses by clicking into the skill’s details.

What a tool is

A tool is a specific capability Customer Agent can use during a conversation to fetch data or take an action. If skills are what Customer Agent knows how to handle, tools are the concrete things it can do.

For example, when a shopper asks “Where is my order?”, Customer Agent uses the Get Customer Orders tool to pull that shopper’s order data from Shopify, then responds with the tracking info.

What tools do

Tools fall into three categories:

• Fetch data — Look up an order, search your product catalog, pull a customer’s subscriptions or coupons
• Take action — Cancel a subscription, apply a discount, create a support ticket (via fully custom tools)
• Integrate with external systems — Call your OMS, CRM, loyalty platform, or any HTTP endpoint (via fully custom tools)

Tools vs. content

Content is static knowledge Customer Agent uses to answer questions — your shipping policy, product descriptions, FAQs. Tools are dynamic actions that fetch real-time data or change something.

A good test: if the answer is the same for every customer, it belongs in content. If the answer depends on who is asking or what they’ve done, it needs a tool.

Tools vs. skills

Skills define what Customer Agent handles. Tools define how it acts during that handling.

A single skill can use multiple tools. A single tool can be used by multiple skills. For example, Get Customer Orders is used by Order Tracking, Order Editing, and Returns & Exchanges.

For a deeper decision framework, see [[Understanding skills vs. tools]].

Tools that come with Customer Agent

Customer Agent comes with a set of tools out of the box that skills use. You don’t set them up — they run when a skill needs them. Examples:

If you’re in the beta for creating fully custom tools, you can see the full list on the Tools page. If you’re not, you can view which tools a skill uses by clicking into that skill’s details.

Fully custom tools 🏷️ BETA

Creating fully custom tools from scratch lets you connect Customer Agent to any HTTP endpoint — your OMS, CRM, loyalty platform, or anything else with an API. Use a fully custom tool when the tools Customer Agent comes with don’t cover what you need.

Access is limited to brands in the managed beta. See [[How to create a tool]] to build one.

How tools get used

Tools are attached to skills. A skill’s instructions tell Customer Agent which tools are available and when to use them.

The flow inside a single conversation:

1. Shopper sends a message
2. Router picks a skill based on intent
3. Skill’s instructions decide whether a tool is needed
4. Customer Agent uses the tool to fetch data or take an action
5. Customer Agent generates a response using what the tool returned

Anatomy of a tool

Every tool has these parts:

• Name — Short identifier (e.g., Get Customer Orders)
• Description — Natural-language explanation of what the tool does. This matters: it drives whether Customer Agent decides to use the tool for a given request.
• Input schema — The parameters the tool takes (e.g., profile_id, order_id)
• HTTP config (fully custom tools only) — The method, URL, headers, and body

A good tool description is specific and unambiguous. Vague descriptions cause Customer Agent to skip a tool when it shouldn’t use one, or use a tool when it shouldn’t.