Behaviour settings
The Behaviour page is where a bot stops being generic. These are the settings whose effect is not obvious from their name — the rest of the page explains itself where you use it.
Contact capture
The form that asks a visitor for their name, email or phone number mid-conversation. What matters is when it appears.
- After N messages. Asking on the first message is the highest-friction choice available: the visitor has had nothing from you yet and is being asked to pay for it. Two or three messages in, after a useful answer, converts better and annoys fewer people.
- Only when handing over. The bot asks for a way to reply only when it is about to pass the conversation to a person. Fewer contacts, and every one of them is somebody who actually wants to be contacted.
- Required. The visitor cannot continue without answering. Use it when a chat is a lead form with better manners; leave it off when it is support, where a frustrated customer being asked for their email is how a bad review starts.
Each field is separately switchable. Asking for a phone number when you will only ever reply by email collects data you have no use for, which is a liability rather than an asset.
Search depth
How many times the bot may search your knowledge base while composing one answer. It defaults low on purpose.
A question with several parts — “do you ship to Norway and how long does it take” — genuinely needs two searches. Most questions need one, and allowing more means the model sometimes searches again out of thoroughness rather than need. Every extra search is time the visitor spends watching a typing indicator, and credits.
Raise it if you see answers that miss a part of a multi-part question. Leave it alone otherwise.
Reasoning
Lets the model think before it answers. Off by default, and that default is deliberate.
Reasoning is spent as output tokens before the visitor sees a single character, so it makes every reply slower and dearer. For a bot answering “what are your opening hours” from a document that says so, it buys nothing at all. It earns its cost when answers require comparing several sources or working through conditions — a pricing bot that must combine a plan, a discount and a term.
The effort setting trades the same thing again: fast keeps replies quick, high is for the cases where being right matters more than being prompt.
When a chat ends
A conversation is considered over after a period of silence. Until it ends, the visitor can come back and continue; afterwards, returning starts a new chat.
This is also what turns an abandoned chat into something you can follow up. When a chat that collected an email or a phone number expires, it moves into the inbox as a ticket, so somebody can reply even though the visitor left.
Short windows suit high-traffic sites where visitors ask one thing and go. Longer windows suit considered purchases, where somebody reads a page, thinks, and comes back. The two- and five-minute options exist for testing and are labelled as such — nobody should ship them.
Handing over to a person
Covered in Escalation and the inbox, because the setting and what happens afterwards are the same subject.