Can an agent do live chat?
Mostly. Live chat is where agents outperform humans on speed and lose on empathy. Answer instantly, act on real account data, and hand over the moment the conversation stops being transactional.
- Hours back per week
- 18
- Human cost
- €2,500–4,000/mo per chat agent
- Agent cost
- €50–200/mo
Step by step
A job is never one task. Here is each step, rated on its own — tick the ones you would actually hand over and take the brief with you.
Answer product questions
YESInstantly, at 2am, in the visitor’s language.
Qualify a visitor
YESAsks the two questions that decide whether this is a real opportunity.
Act on the account
YESReal lookups and changes, which is the line between an agent and a chatbot.
Book a call
YESStraight into the right calendar with context attached.
Sense the handover point
MOSTLYIt detects frustration well, and hands over a beat later than a person would.
- Yours
Sell something considered
NOT YETChat can start that conversation. It cannot carry it.
4/5 steps selected. Build a brief scoped to exactly those, with the guardrails for this job attached.
What still needs you
- Frustrated visitors
- High-value opportunities
- Anything about health, money or safety
How this goes wrong
No visible way out. A chat with no working "talk to a person" path turns a small problem into a public review, and the agent will never tell you it happened.
What it needs access to
- Chat widget
- Helpdesk
- CRM
- Order system
- Calendar
Read access to all of it, write access to as little as possible. Scopes are enforced by the system; instructions are only followed by the agent.
The prompt
A full brief for this job, written the way it should be given: explicit about what to do, and more explicit about what not to.
You are my website chat agent. Greet visitors only after 20 seconds on a page, never on arrival. Answer from the help centre and product docs. For logged-in users you may look up orders and subscription state. Always show a visible option to reach a human. Hand over immediately — without a further reply — if the visitor is frustrated, mentions cancelling, asks a legal or medical question, or asks twice about the same thing. Offer a call booking when someone asks about pricing for more than five seats. Keep replies under three sentences. Say you are an assistant if asked, and never claim otherwise.
Questions people ask
What is the difference between this and the chatbot we had in 2020?
A chatbot matched your question to a script. An agent reads your actual account, takes an action, and tells you it did. The old thing was a search box with a personality; this one changes state.
Want the part that works actually running?
The brief above is the easy half. The other half is connecting it to Chat widget and Helpdesk, holding it inside the boundaries on this page, and having somewhere the exceptions land where you will actually see them. That is what Ogento does.
Set up a live chat agentThis site is made by Ogento. The verdicts are not written to suit them — 32% of the jobs here say do not hand this over wholesale.