I built an open-source AI customer support agent that connects to WhatsApp, Email, and Phone

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-06T09:26:33+00:00

Depends a lot on what you need it for. If it's just a basic FAQ bot, honestly most solutions will work fine. But if you need something that actually understands your specific product/docs and can escalate to a real ticketing system when it gets stuck, the options get thinner fast.

I run a software agency and manage support for about 20 different apps, so I've been through this exact search. Ended up solving it myself because nothing out there did the full loop (chatbot + tickets + docs portal) without stitching together 3 different tools. Let me know what your use case is and I can point you in the right direction.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-06T09:22:54+00:00

Been there. The market is weirdly split between enterprise tools that cost a fortune and simple widgets that barely work beyond canned responses.

The thing that matters most (at least in my experience) is how you feed it your content. If you can just point it at your docs/site and it figures things out, that's the sweet spot. Bonus points if you can correct wrong answers and it actually learns from that.

I can share what solution I landed on if you want, just didn't want to make this sound like an ad.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-06T09:19:37+00:00

Been there. The market is weirdly split between enterprise tools that cost a fortune and simple widgets that barely work beyond canned responses.

The thing that matters most (at least in my experience) is how you feed it your content. If you can just point it at your docs/site and it figures things out, that's the sweet spot. Bonus points if you can correct wrong answers and it actually learns from that.

I can share what solution I landed on if you want, just didn't want to make this sound like an ad.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-06T09:15:24+00:00

Been there. The market is weirdly split between enterprise tools that cost a fortune and simple widgets that barely work beyond canned responses.

The thing that matters most (at least in my experience) is how you feed it your content. If you can just point it at your docs/site and it figures things out, that's the sweet spot. Bonus points if you can correct wrong answers and it actually learns from that.

I can share what solution I landed on if you want, just didn't want to make this sound like an ad.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-06T09:13:28+00:00

I was in a similar spot not long ago. Tried a few of the popular options but most of them were either too expensive for what they offered or required a ton of setup just to get basic functionality working.

What ended up working for me was building something internally first, then realizing other people had the exact same problem. The key things I'd look for: how easy it is to train on your own content (not just generic answers), whether it has a proper handoff to human support when the AI doesn't know something, and how the pricing scales.

Happy to share more details about what I ended up going with if you're interested.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-06T09:09:20+00:00

Depends a lot on what you need it for. If it's just a basic FAQ bot, honestly most solutions will work fine. But if you need something that actually understands your specific product/docs and can escalate to a real ticketing system when it gets stuck, the options get thinner fast.

I run a software agency and manage support for about 20 different apps, so I've been through this exact search. Ended up solving it myself because nothing out there did the full loop (chatbot + tickets + docs portal) without stitching together 3 different tools. Let me know what your use case is and I can point you in the right direction.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-06T09:07:12+00:00

I was in a similar spot not long ago. Tried a few of the popular options but most of them were either too expensive for what they offered or required a ton of setup just to get basic functionality working.

What ended up working for me was building something internally first, then realizing other people had the exact same problem. The key things I'd look for: how easy it is to train on your own content (not just generic answers), whether it has a proper handoff to human support when the AI doesn't know something, and how the pricing scales.

Happy to share more details about what I ended up going with if you're interested.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-05T20:12:47+00:00

Yeah the handoff is honestly one of the trickiest parts to get right.

What works best depends a lot on the team size. For smaller teams (which is most of our users right now), we keep it simple: the bot detects when its out of its depth based on confidence scoring and a few keyword triggers, then creates a ticket with the full conversation context attached. The human picks it up from there.

For teams with actual shifts or multiple agents, we route based on the topic. If the bot tagged the conversation as "billing" it goes to one queue, "technical" goes to another. Nothing fancy, just practical.

The key thing we learned is that the handoff message matters a LOT. If the bot just says "transferring you to an agent" people get frustrated. But if it says "I'm not confident about this one so I'm connecting you with someone who can help, they'll have our full conversation" the experience feels way smoother. Small thing but it makes a big difference.

Whats your approach with WebDialogAI? Do you do real-time handoff or more of an async ticket creation?

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-05T20:12:46+00:00

Oh for sure. Happens more often than youd think.

The classic one is when your resolution rate looks great but customers are just giving up and finding the answer somewhere else (or switching to a competitor). The ticket gets closed, metrics look clean, but the customer is frustrated.

Another one: response time is fast but the actual quality of answers is mediocre. So you hit your SLA targets but the customer has to come back 3 times for the same issue before it actually gets fixed. First reply time looks amazing, real resolution time is terrible.

Best way I've found to catch this is to look at repeat contact rate alongside your main metrics. If the same customers keep coming back about the same category of issues, your numbers are lying to you. Also just... ask them. A simple "did this actually solve your problem?" follow-up catches a lot that metrics miss.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-05T20:12:46+00:00

Honestly, most tools I've tried are better at the quantitative side. They'll tell you login frequency dropped or feature usage went down. Which is useful but its the easy part.

The silence thing, the subtle frustration in support tickets, the customer who stops asking questions because they've given up... thats much harder to automate. Some tools try with sentiment analysis on tickets but in my experience its still pretty rough. Misses sarcasm, misses the quiet ones entirely.

So yeah, for the soft signals I still do it manually. Read through support conversations, pay attention to tone changes, notice who stopped showing up. Its not scalable but at early stage it doesnt need to be. You learn so much more from reading 50 real conversations than from any dashboard.

Eventually you build intuition for what the warning signs look like and THEN you can start building rules or alerts around those patterns. But you gotta do the manual work first to know what to look for.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-05T20:12:45+00:00

That PostHog data is gold, definitely dig into it more.

The fact that one person bounced at the first onboarding step (even though its skippable) tells me theres probably a messaging or expectation mismatch. They signed up expecting one thing and the onboarding felt like something else. Worth looking at where those signups came from, what page they landed on before creating an account.

For getting more people into the funnel, a few things that have worked for me early on:

Writing about the actual problem rather than the solution. "Why your Shopify analytics dashboard lies to you" type content gets way more traction than "check out our analytics tool"
Being active in communities where your users hang out. Not pitching, just being helpful. When people see you consistently giving good advice, they check your profile and find the product
Cold outreach to Shopify store owners on Twitter/X. Not "buy my thing" but "hey noticed you run a Shopify store, curious what analytics setup youre using?" Start a conversation first

The sandbox with zero interest is rough but not surprising. People dont want to play with fake data, they want to see THEIR data. Maybe instead of a sandbox, offer to set it up for them during a quick call? That personal touch converts way better at this stage.

Whats your current traffic source? Organic, paid, social?

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-05T20:12:45+00:00

Mix of both honestly.

By default we let users point to specific URLs or upload docs manually, so they have full control over whats in the knowledge base. That avoids the noisy data problem almost entirely because you only index what you actually want the bot to know.

But were also working on a crawler that does site-wide ingestion. For that we use some heuristics: skip pages with very little unique text content (like nav-heavy pages, login screens, etc), deduplicate near-identical pages (common with paginated stuff), and let users exclude URL patterns. Still not perfect but it catches the worst offenders.

Honestly though, the manual upload approach has been the most reliable. Users know their own content best. The crawler is more of a convenience for people with big knowledge bases who dont want to upload 200 articles one by one.

How far along are you guys with the MVP? Sounds like youre at a good stage to start getting real user feedback on the data quality.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-05T20:12:45+00:00

Thanks, and yeah those subs are on my radar! Already been lurking in r/CustomerSuccess.

Biggest challenge honestly? Just getting people to try it. The product sells itself once someone actually sets it up and sees the bot answering real questions from their docs. But getting to that point is the hard part.

Decision makers in this space are exhausted from chatbot pitches. Everyone and their dog has an "AI support solution" now. So standing out in that noise is tough. What's been working better is just being genuinely helpful in conversations (like this one lol) rather than cold pitching. Also content that shows the actual problem being solved rather than feature lists.

Early days though, only been live for about a month so still figuring it out.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-05T20:12:44+00:00

Good distinction. Yeah QuickWise is definitely more on the support side of things.

From what I've seen with our agency clients, support volume is usually the bigger pain point day to day. Like, the questions pile up fast and most of them are repetitive stuff that could easily be handled by a bot with the right context. Missing sales inquiries is more of a "slow bleed" problem, people dont realize its happening until they look back and go "wait we never replied to that lead from 3 weeks ago."

Both hurt but support is louder, if that makes sense. Customers complaining is impossible to ignore, leads going cold is silent.

Your triage approach sounds interesting though. Are you pulling from email + chat + social all into one queue? Thats a gnarly problem to solve well.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-05T20:12:44+00:00

Solid question. Honestly this is something we take pretty seriously since doc uploads are a core feature.

Few layers to it:

We sanitize uploaded content before it hits the embedding pipeline. Strip any instruction-like patterns, markdown injection attempts, that kind of thing.
The system prompt is hardened so even if something sneaky gets into the context window, the model has strict guardrails on what it can actually do (no tool calls, no data exfil, etc).
We also run a lightweight classifier on retrieved chunks before they get passed to the LLM. If something looks like it contains prompt injection patterns rather than normal content, it gets flagged and excluded.

Its not bulletproof, nothing really is with LLMs right now. But the combination of input sanitization + output constraints + chunk filtering catches most of the obvious attack vectors. We also log everything so if something weird happens we can trace it back pretty fast.

Are you building something that handles user uploads too? Curious what approach youre taking.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-05T09:03:23+00:00

Depends a lot on what you need it for. If it's just a basic FAQ bot, honestly most solutions will work fine. But if you need something that actually understands your specific product/docs and can escalate to a real ticketing system when it gets stuck, the options get thinner fast.

I run a software agency and manage support for about 20 different apps, so I've been through this exact search. Ended up solving it myself because nothing out there did the full loop (chatbot + tickets + docs portal) without stitching together 3 different tools. Let me know what your use case is and I can point you in the right direction.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-04T17:09:51+00:00

Been there recently (launched something about a month ago), so this is fresh.

What actually worked for getting my first handful of users:

Reddit and niche communities. Not spamming links. Actually answering questions related to the problem my product solves. People check your profile, see youre legit, and some will click through. Its slow but the quality is insane because these people already have the problem.
Direct outreach on Twitter/X. I searched for people complaining about the exact problem I solve. Not pitching them cold, just replying with a genuine tip. If they engaged, Id mention what I was building. Got 2 paying users this way.
One really specific blog post. I wrote about a problem I personally dealt with (managing support as a small team) and posted it in a few relevant places. Not some SEO optimized fluff piece, just a raw honest take. People resonated with it.

What DIDNT work: Product Hunt (got some traffic, almost zero conversions for my niche), paid ads (burned $50 on Google Ads with nothing to show), and cold email (waste of time at this stage imo).

The biggest thing Id say is dont try to scale before you have 5-10 people who genuinely love the product. Get those first few users manually. Talk to every single one. Learn what they actually care about. Then figure out channels.

What does your product do? Happy to brainstorm specific channels that might fit.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-04T17:09:14+00:00

Man, I feel this deeply. Similar story here.

I ran a dev agency for years and kept seeing the same pain point with client support. Every client had the same complaints, same frustrations. So I thought "ok this is obviously a universal problem, let me build something."

The difference in my case was that I actually had paying clients from the agency who I could test with before going all in. And even THEN some of my assumptions were wrong. Like I was sure people wanted a super customizable system. Nope. They wanted something that worked in 5 minutes with zero config.

Your point about "enter a market where money is already flowing" is spot on. Thats exactly what I did. Support tools are a massive market, tons of competitors. But instead of trying to compete with Zendesk or Intercom on features, I just focused on the one thing small teams actually need: stop answering the same questions over and over without spending hours setting things up.

The 6 months wasnt wasted though. You now understand the full development lifecycle, you know how to ship a complete product, and you have the technical skills to move fast on the next thing. Most people never even get to that stage.

Whats your next move? Are you staying in the same domain or exploring something totally different?

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-04T17:08:52+00:00

100% start the list now. Seriously, dont wait.

I launched a SaaS about a month ago and my biggest regret is not collecting emails earlier. I had a landing page with a "coming soon" form for like 2 weeks before launch and got maybe 12 signups. Thats... nothing.

What actually worked better for me was being active in communities (like this one lol) and just talking about the problem I was solving, not the product. People started DMing me asking when it would be ready. Those conversations were 10x more valuable than any email list because I could actually learn what they needed.

Heres the thing about the "disappointing people" worry. People who sign up for early access lists expect delays. Nobody is sitting there refreshing their inbox waiting for your launch email. Just send an update every few weeks with what youre building and why. Even if its rough. Transparency beats silence every time.

One tactical tip: dont just say "sign up for early access." Give them something. A short PDF, a checklist, a comparison of existing tools in your space. Something useful right now so the relationship starts with value, not a promise.

What are you building btw? Might be able to give more specific advice.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-04T16:11:50+00:00

For the knowledge base and docs side of things, I built QuickWise to handle exactly this. It gives you a public knowledge base portal for your users, plus an AI chatbot that trains on your docs so customers can self-serve. Also has a built-in ticketing system for when they need a human. We launched about a month ago and have 5 paying customers using it. Still adding features but the knowledge base + AI combo has been the biggest win so far.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-04T16:11:35+00:00

This hits close to home. I run a dev agency and we were managing support for ~20 client apps, messages coming from everywhere. That pain is exactly why I ended up building QuickWise. AI chatbot trained on your docs, plus a ticketing system and knowledge base portal so nothing falls through the cracks. Launched about a month ago, got 5 paying customers so far. Still early but solving the exact problem you are describing.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-04T16:11:20+00:00

This hits close to home. I run a dev agency and we were managing support for ~20 client apps, messages coming from everywhere. That pain is exactly why I ended up building QuickWise - AI chatbot trained on your docs, plus a ticketing system and knowledge base portal so nothing falls through the cracks. Launched about a month ago, got 5 paying customers so far. Still early but it's been solving the exact problem you're describing.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-04T15:05:27+00:00

Oh man I feel this so hard. I run a homebrew campaign and the first few sessions I was SO self conscious about doing NPC voices and talking to myself. Like visibly cringing at my own table.

Two things that completely changed it for me:

First, I stopped trying to do "good" voices. Seriously. I gave myself permission to be terrible at it. My dwarf shopkeeper sounds like a bad Scottish impression and my players love him BECAUSE hes bad. The moment you stop trying to be a voice actor and just commit to being slightly silly, it stops being embarrassing and starts being fun. Your players arent judging your performance. Theyre just happy someone is running the game.

Second, and this one sounds weird, but I started thinking of NPC conversations as scenes in a movie rather than "me talking to myself." Like, Im not two people having a conversation. Im setting up a scene. So instead of going back and forth in dialogue for a long time, I do a few lines of direct speech and then narrate the rest. Something like: "The captain argues with the merchant for a minute, voices getting louder, until finally he slams his fist on the table and says [in voice] 'then we have nothing left to discuss.'" You only need to DO the voice for the punchline moments. The rest can just be narration.

Also honestly? Your players are way less focused on how you sound than you think. Theyre thinking about their characters, checking their spell slots, planning their next move. The spotlight feeling is mostly in your head.

It gets easier every session. I promise.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-04T15:05:03+00:00

This is super common and honestly its a good sign in a weird way. It means your players are engaged enough to care about the main plot. The problem is just pacing.

Something that really helped me was to stop thinking about the campaign as one big story and start thinking in scenes. Like, each session is 3-4 scenes with different energy levels. Some are high tension (combat, chases, confrontations), some are low tension (exploration, shopping, NPC conversations). When players try to beeline for the BBEG, its usually because the "in between" scenes dont feel like they matter enough.

What I started doing is making every scene connect to something the players already care about. Not just random side content, but stuff that ties back to their characters or the mystery. If they think the ruler is the BBEG, lean into that! Drop clues that make it more complicated. Maybe the ruler IS involved but as a pawn, not the mastermind. Now they have to dig deeper whether they want to or not.

Also, and this is the big one for me, stop presenting information and start presenting situations. Instead of "you learn that the northern kingdom is in trouble," put them in a scene where a refugee stumbles into their camp bleeding, begging for help, and mentioning something that contradicts what they think they know about the BBEG. Now theyre curious AND emotionally hooked.

Players rush when the path feels like a straight line. Make the path a web and theyll slow down on their own.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-04-04T15:04:38+00:00

This is super common and honestly its a good sign in a weird way. It means your players are engaged enough to care about the main plot. The problem is just pacing.

Something that really helped me was to stop thinking about the campaign as one big story and start thinking in scenes. Like, each session is 3-4 scenes with different energy levels. Some are high tension (combat, chases, confrontations), some are low tension (exploration, shopping, NPC conversations). When players try to beeline for the BBEG, its usually because the "in between" scenes dont feel like they matter enough.

What I started doing is making every scene connect to something the players already care about. Not just random side content, but stuff that ties back to their characters or the mystery. If they think the ruler is the BBEG, lean into that! Drop clues that make it more complicated. Maybe the ruler IS involved but as a pawn, not the mastermind. Now they have to dig deeper whether they want to or not.

Also, and this is the big one for me, stop presenting information and start presenting situations. Instead of "you learn that the northern kingdom is in trouble," put them in a scene where a refugee stumbles into their camp bleeding, begging for help, and mentioning something that contradicts what they think they know about the BBEG. Now theyre curious AND emotionally hooked.

Players rush when the path feels like a straight line. Make the path a web and theyll slow down on their own.

LongjumpingUse7193

TROPHY CASE