Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Support Team or higher |
| Access | Admin |
The first thing a customer sees. Three sentences that decide whether they type their question or leave.
Set it
- In the AI agents workspace, select the AI agent.
- Click Content in the sidebar and select Use cases.
- Click the Categories filter, select System replies and click Apply.
- Open Welcome reply and go to the Replies tab. Click Edit dialogue on a zero-training agent, or pick Dialogue or Procedure on an agentic one.
- Write the greeting, save, and test how the conversation opens.
The welcome reply is one of the system replies every advanced AI agent is given, and it is the one customers always see, so it is worth more than the ten minutes it usually gets.
Where the wording comes from
The greeting is one of the agent's replies, but the voice around it is set elsewhere, under Content in the sidebar. Identity holds the agent's name, your company name and the business profile; Tone of voice holds the tone and the answer length. Both pages have a Test button that opens a test window on the right, so you can hear how a change sounds before you save it.
One more setting belongs with the greeting: Pronoun formality, also under Content, decides per language whether the agent addresses people formally or informally. It is set to formal by default, and it applies only in languages that make the distinction. A greeting is the first place a customer notices you got that wrong.
Say what it is
That this is an automated assistant. Not buried, not implied. Customers who find out later feel misled; customers told up front adjust how they type.
Say what it can do
One line naming the subjects it handles. "I can help with orders, deliveries and returns" sets an expectation that prevents most of the disappointing exchanges, because people ask about those things.
A greeting that promises to help with anything is a promise it will break within the hour.
Say how to reach a person
In the greeting itself. It costs one line and it removes the anxiety that makes people hostile to automated conversations.
Counter-intuitively, saying a human is available reduces how often people demand one.
Then get out of the way
No menu of categories, no request to confirm anything. The customer came with a question; let them ask it.
Keep it to three lines
What this is, what it covers, how to get a person. Anything more is read as an obstacle.
Language is handled separately
The Language section sets the default language and can translate answers automatically into the language the customer is using. That covers the replies; it does not decide whether your greeting reads well in each of them, which is a question for somebody who speaks it.
Match it per channel
A greeting on the website widget reaches somebody mid-task. The same words by email reach somebody who wrote in yesterday. Where you use both, they should not be identical.
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