Create Your First Agent

An agent is your AI chatbot. It has its own name, personality, knowledge base, appearance, and set of channels it's deployed on. You can create as many agents as your plan allows — for example one for customer support, one for sales, and one for a specific product line.

This guide walks through every step of creating and fully configuring a new agent. The initial setup takes about 5 minutes; full configuration typically takes 15–20 minutes.

Step 1 — Create the agent

Writing effective instructions

The instructions field (also called the system prompt) is sent to the AI model before every conversation. It sets the context the model uses to shape every response. Weak instructions produce generic, off-brand replies. Strong instructions produce focused, helpful, on-brand conversations.

What to include

• •Role — Who is this agent? "You are a customer support assistant for Acme Ltd, a UK-based furniture retailer."
• •Purpose — What should it do? "Your job is to answer questions about our products, delivery, and returns policy."
• •Tone — How should it speak? "Be friendly, concise, and professional. Use British English."
• •Boundaries — What should it avoid? "Do not discuss competitor products. Do not provide legal or medical advice."
• •Fallback behaviour — What if it doesn't know? "If you do not know the answer, say so politely and direct the visitor to support@acme.co.uk."
• •Special instructions — "Always ask for the customer's order number before troubleshooting delivery issues."

Example instructions

You are a friendly and professional support assistant for Acme Furniture, a UK furniture retailer.
Your job is to help customers with product questions, delivery timescales, returns, and order status.
Always be warm and concise. Use British English spelling.
If a customer asks about an order, ask for their order number first.
If you don't know the answer to a question, say "I'm not sure about that — please contact our team at support@acme.co.uk for further help."
Do not discuss pricing for commercial or trade orders — direct those customers to our trade team.

Choosing an AI model

AIChatVault supports multiple large language models. You select the model in Settings → AI Model. Each has different strengths, speeds, and credit costs per message.

Advanced AI model settings

Inside Settings → AI Model you can tune two parameters beyond model selection:

Configuring the chat interface

Go to Settings → Chat Interface to control how the widget looks to visitors. These settings affect the web widget, help page, and mobile SDK bubble.

Security settings

Go to Settings → Security to control where and how the agent can be used.

• •Allowed domains — List the domains where the widget is permitted to load (e.g. yoursite.com, shop.yoursite.com). Requests from unlisted domains are blocked. Leave blank to allow all domains (useful during development).
• •Rate limiting — Set a maximum number of messages per session or per IP address to prevent abuse.
• •CAPTCHA — Enable to require human verification before the first message. Reduces spam but adds friction.

Lead capture

Go to Settings → Lead Capture to configure the agent to collect visitor contact details during a conversation.

• •Choose which fields to collect: Name, Email, Phone, or custom fields.
• •Set when to ask: before the first message (gate), after a set number of messages, or when the visitor asks for further help.
• •Collected leads appear in the Contacts section of your dashboard.
• •You can export leads as CSV or connect them to your CRM via Webhook or Zapier.

Notifications

Go to Settings → Notifications to receive email alerts about chat activity.

• •New conversation started — get notified when a visitor opens the chat.
• •Lead captured — get notified when a visitor submits their contact details.
• •Human handoff requested — get notified when the agent escalates to a human.
• •Set up to 3 notification email addresses per agent.

Testing your agent before going live