been building an agent that handles customer dms for small stores. early version could answer questions and take orders, but it was kind of a island, it knew how to chat but not much else.
two changes made it actually worth using. first, we wired it into the full product catalog, so instead of generic yes we have that, it handles real product questions, specs, variants, what goes with what. second, and this is the part that surprised us, we connected it to the store’s product ads. so when someone messages straight from an ad, the agent picks them up, handles the whole conversation, takes the order, and pushes it to the store tagged with the source. the owner can see “this order came from this ad, closed in chat” instead of guessing.
the insight for us was that the replies were never the hard part or the valuable part. the value was closing the loop, ad to conversation to order to attribution, so the messaging stops being a separate silo and the owner actually knows what’s working.
for people who’ve built anything touching customer conversations, did you find the same, that the standalone chat was the easy 80% and the real value was connecting it to the rest of the business? curious where you drew the line on what to connect versus keep separate.