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, and you can create fully custom tools from scratch. You’ll find them under Customer Agent > Connectors.

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 3 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 another service with a publicly reachable 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 capabilities that fetch information or take actions. For example, Search Company Knowledge retrieves answers from your content.

A good test: if the answer is a policy or fact you can write down, add it as content. If the answer depends on who is asking or what they’ve done, or requires current data or an action in another system, use 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 that skills use. The tools available depend on your connected integrations. Some built-in tools also have settings you configure when adding them to a skill, such as the number of orders to retrieve. Examples:

Get Customer Orders, Get Customer Coupons, Get Customer Subscriptions, and Get Profile require the shopper to be authenticated before they can retrieve that shopper’s data.

To browse tools, go to Customer Agent > Connectors and open a connector, or open Custom for fully custom tools. You can also view which tools a skill uses by opening that skill’s details.

Fully custom tools

Creating fully custom tools from scratch lets you connect Customer Agent to your OMS, CRM, loyalty platform, or another service with a publicly reachable HTTP endpoint. Use a fully custom tool when the tools Customer Agent comes with don’t cover what you need. The endpoint must use a public hostname, not an IP address or a private-network address.

Any Customer Agent account can create custom tools. 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, query parameters, and body

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

Additional resources