Understanding Skills

You will learn

What skills are, which ones Customer Agent comes with out of the box, what each one does, and what prerequisites unlock which skills. By the end, you’ll know which skills are running for your brand and which integrations you’d need to add to enable more.

What skills are

A skill is a scoped capability that lets Customer Agent handle a specific type of shopper request — like tracking an order, helping with a return, or recommending a product. Customer Agent comes with built-in skills, so you don’t need to write their instructions. Some skills require integrations or additional setup.

Built-in skills are automatically active when their prerequisites are met. You can disable a built-in skill if you don’t want Customer Agent to handle that type of request. Check Customer Agent > Skills to see which skills are live for your account.

You can create fully custom skills from scratch and edit them later. Editing built-in skills (changing instructions, swapping tools) is coming soon.

How a skill handles a request

When a shopper sends a message, Customer Agent runs through a few steps:

1. Receives the message from the shopper across web chat, SMS, email, or WhatsApp.
2. Adds context — pulls in the shopper’s profile, brand summary, and any active Guidance.
3. Reads skills — reads the instructions for relevant available skills as needed, based on what the shopper is asking.
4. Responds — Customer Agent uses the relevant skills’ instructions and tools, along with your content, to generate a response.
5. Hands off if needed — Customer Agent follows your escalation rules and can offer or start a handoff to a human when it can’t resolve the request.

The skills Customer Agent comes with

Customer Agent includes 7 built-in skills. The skills available to your account depend on your store and setup.

Prerequisites

Each skill needs specific data or integrations to work. Built-in skills become active once their prerequisites are met, unless you have disabled them.

• Shopify connection — Supports Product Recommendations, Order tracking & management, and Coupon & discount retrieval. Order tracking & management also supports Magento 2 and WooCommerce.
• Returns & exchanges requires Shopify and a configured returns provider, such as Loop or AfterShip.
• Subscription editing requires a subscriptions provider — Recharge (full data visibility) or Skio (active subscriptions only).
• Loyalty requires a loyalty provider — Yotpo or Smile.io.

For returns, subscriptions, or loyalty connected through Customer Hub, you need paid or trial Customer Hub access and the corresponding app enabled in Customer Hub.

If Coupon & discount retrieval shows Requires Customer Hub, you need paid or trial Customer Hub access. Adding promotion details to your content does not create customer-specific coupon codes.

Check each skill’s status on Customer Agent > Skills. Live means it is active. A prerequisite message tells you what setup is missing. Coming Soon means the skill is not yet available to your account. If you previously disabled a built-in skill, use Enable skill in its row’s action menu after completing setup.

How shoppers interact across channels

Different channels render skill responses differently:

• Web chat — Rich product cards, order cards, inline buttons (e.g., “Track shipment,” “View order”).
• SMS & WhatsApp — Deep links to product pages, tracking pages, and the customer hub.
• Email — Plain text plus links; no interactive components.

Sign-in and handoff behavior also differ by channel. In web chat, shoppers need to sign in before Customer Agent can retrieve their orders, subscriptions, or personal coupons. General policy questions can be answered without sign-in. SMS and WhatsApp use the shopper’s phone number, and email uses their email address, to identify the shopper.

For example, the built-in order skill can offer a human handoff in web chat. In SMS, WhatsApp, or email, it hands off directly when human help is needed.

Skill-specific notes

A few skills have behavior worth knowing about:

• Coupon & discount retrieval retrieves existing coupons associated with the shopper’s profile and uses your content to answer general promotion questions. It does not generate new codes.
• Subscription editing with Skio shows active subscriptions only — paused or canceled subscriptions aren’t available to the skill.
• Order tracking & management checks order details and policies for changes or cancellations. In web chat, it can show a View order button that opens the order in Customer Hub and offer a handoff to your team. It doesn’t edit orders directly.

Customizing skills

You can disable built-in skills you don’t want active, or create and edit fully custom skills for specialized handling. Built-in skill instructions and tools are not editable.

If you need different behavior than what an existing skill provides today, you have a few paths:

• Disable a built-in skill if you don’t want it handling requests. Go to Customer Agent > Skills, open the skill’s row action menu, and select Disable skill. To restore it, select Enable skill from the same menu.
• Unpublish a custom skill to stop it handling live conversations. Open the skill from Customer Agent > Skills, select the Details tab, open the Actions menu, and select Unpublish.
• Build a fully custom skill for new workflows or specialized handling
• Use Guidance for global behavior changes — tone, communication style, escalation triggers

Next steps

• Create a skill if you need behavior the skills Customer Agent comes with don’t cover
• Set up Guidance to control how all skills behave
• Add content so skills like General Q&A have material to draw from
• Monitor performance in Customer Agent > Analytics

Additional resources