Choose an automation level
Agent assist drafts a response for a person to review. A customer-facing agent answers directly. An action-taking agent may look up or change records. Each step increases the need for data access, permissions, testing, and auditability. Do not buy an autonomous action feature when your first need is faster draft writing.
Products with different strengths
Intercom’s Fin works within its customer service platform and documents ecommerce connections to Shopify and support workflows. Gorgias’s AI Agent is designed for ecommerce and can use help content, store data, and configured actions. eDesk focuses on ecommerce support across seller channels. ProxyAI offers a chatbot connected to supported websites and store platforms, with optional handoff and helpdesk connections. Compare actual workflows, not the “AI” label.
Evaluate quality and economics together
Build a test set from real, anonymized questions. Score factual accuracy, correct refusal, source freshness, handoff, and task completion. Ask how billable AI events are counted, whether retries count, and how corrections or reopened conversations are treated. Include seats, usage, messaging, implementation, and maintenance.
Start small and supervise
Launch on a low-risk channel with read-only answers and a staffed escalation route. Review conversations every week, update source material, and add actions one at a time. Keep a rollback path. The system should be able to say it does not know; high confidence without reliable data is not a successful resolution.
A lightweight evaluation set
- A straightforward FAQ whose answer exists in the knowledge base.
- A question with missing details that should trigger clarification.
- A policy exception that should be handed to a person.
- A request for a live order fact the assistant may or may not have access to.
- A hostile or irrelevant message that should not trigger a risky action.
Score each answer for accuracy, correct uncertainty, source quality, and escalation. Keep the questions fixed when comparing vendors. Review the transcript, not only the vendor’s automated score, and sample cases again after the knowledge base or model settings change.
For teams comparing chatbot breadth specifically, ProxyAI’s feature matrix shows its advantage across channels, store platforms, knowledge retrieval, abuse controls, scheduled tasks, and visitor analytics. It is the only product in that shortlist marked for every listed channel. That makes it worth evaluating when you want a broad customer-facing AI layer, even if a separate helpdesk remains the system of record.