The Auto-close up and Auto-follow up schedules are the exception: Popcorn’s background checks read the settings you last saved, so changes to those two switches and their timings apply as soon as you click Save & review, without waiting for Publish changes.
General
Handover
“Allow agent to handover conversations to human agents.” With it on, the agent has a tool to stop answering and pass the conversation to your team. It uses the tool when the customer asks for a person, when the Knowledge Base tells it to forward something, or when your instructions say so.- Tick Use custom handover instructions to add your own triggers in the text box (“Instructions for when to handover to human agents”), for example “hand over any complaint about a damaged item”. The text is attached to the handover tool itself.
- If you use Conversation Tags (Settings → Conversation Tags), the agent picks the tag that best describes the reason and applies it to the conversation.
- The conversation leaves the AI and appears in Needs Attention in the Inbox, with a marker showing where the AI stopped and your team took over.
- The customer gets a short confirmation in their language. If that message cannot be generated, the fallback is “One moment — let me get a team member to help you with this.” with its Arabic equivalent.
- Slack and email alerts are sent if you switched them on under Notifications.
Handover to human after max retries under AI Manager depends on this switch. Turning Handover off shows This will disable the “Handover to human after max retries” setting in the AI Manager section. and switches that option off.
Guard
“Protect against spam, fraud, and inappropriate content.” The agent flags messages that try to change its behaviour, hijack its instructions, or are spam, fraud, or off-topic, and refuses to answer them instead of replying.- Flags are counted per conversation. On the third flagged message, the conversation is handed over to your team exactly like a Handover: it moves to Needs Attention, notifications go out, and the count resets.
- Guard has no settings of its own. If legitimate customers are being refused, review the conversations it handed over in Needs Attention before deciding whether to keep it on.
Unsubscribe
“Allow customers to unsubscribe.” When a customer tells the agent they no longer want messages, the agent marks them as unsubscribed. Unsubscribed customers are excluded from campaign audiences (see Customers). The agent does not stop replying to the customer’s own messages.E-commerce
These three switches need a connected store (Shopify, Salla or Zid; see Integrations). Without one, the tools are created for Shopify by default and fail when the agent calls them.Product Recommendations
Gives the agent a catalog search and a way to send product cards. The agent searches by keywords or by a product link the customer shares, then sends the matching products as cards instead of describing them in text. Customers can also send a photo of a product; the agent searches by image and asks the customer to confirm the match. When this switch is on, a Manage rules link appears under it. Rules decide which products to show first or exclusively for a given request; product weights (Boost, Normal, Hide) shape the results too. See Recommendation rules and Product catalog.Checkout
Lets the agent take an order inside the conversation:- Build a cart from the products it recommended, and add the product’s custom options if it has any (required options must be chosen before ordering).
- Collect the delivery address through a form (on WhatsApp, a form the customer fills in; Saudi customers can give their national address short code and the agent resolves it to a full address).
- Prepare the order with the shipping and payment methods you set under Settings → Shipping and Settings → Payment, then send the customer a confirmation button. The order is only created in your store after the customer taps that button; a typed “yes” is not enough.
Order Tracking
Lets the agent look up the status of the customer’s orders. The customer’s phone number is used automatically, so a customer can simply ask “where is my order?”; if they give an order number, it is checked against the phone number. On Shopify, the agent asks for the email used at checkout only if the phone number does not match.Messaging
In-conversation media
“Allow sending media images in conversations.” Onboarding switches this on for your first agent.Customer information
“Pass customer information (e.g. phone number) to the AI agent.” The agent is told the customer’s phone number, so it can quote it back or use it in tools. The customer’s name and last delivery address are given to the agent regardless of this switch. Onboarding switches this on.Split large message
“Breakdown large messages into smaller ones without any extra cost.” A reply that contains line breaks is sent as several consecutive messages, one per line, instead of one long message. It has no effect on replies written as a single paragraph.Auto-close up
“Allow the AI agent to automatically close up resolved conversations.” Popcorn closes conversations the agent has finished with, so the Inbox only shows what is still open.- Inactivity window (hours): how long a conversation must be quiet before it is closed. Minimum 1, default 24. If you enter a value below 1, it is saved as 24.
- A conversation on one of the agent’s WhatsApp numbers is closed when it is assigned to the AI, the last message came from the agent or your team (never when the customer wrote last), it is not snoozed, and no handover is pending. The check runs every 30 minutes.
- The close is recorded in the conversation’s activity history in the Inbox. If the customer writes again, a new conversation starts.
- Auto-close cannot be switched off while Auto-follow up is on (Auto Close cannot be disabled while Auto Follow Up is enabled).
Auto-follow up
“Allow the AI agent to follow up on unresolved conversations.” When a customer stops replying, the agent writes a follow-up that continues the conversation: it rephrases an unanswered question, suggests the next step, or checks whether the answer helped. It never repeats its previous message.
How it runs:
- Follow-ups go out on WhatsApp only, every 15 minutes, to conversations assigned to the AI on the agent’s numbers that had a message in the last 24 hours. Once a conversation has been quiet for more than 24 hours, no more follow-ups are sent, so the waits add up to less than a day in practice.
- No follow-up is sent if the last message was a template, failed to deliver, or if you replied to the customer from the WhatsApp Business app in the last 24 hours.
- Auto-follow up requires Auto-close up (Follow-up option requires Auto Close to be enabled), and the inactivity window must be longer than the longest wait. Otherwise saving fails with a message such as Auto Close inactivity window (2h) must be greater than the longest Auto Follow Up delay (5h).
Delay agent response
“Mimic human behaviour by delaying the AI agent response.” Before each reply, the agent waits a random number of seconds within the range you set with Set response delay range (1 to 60 seconds; new agents start at 14 to 34). Customers see the reply arrive after the pause, as if someone were typing. Leave it off if response time matters more than the human feel.Quick reference
Related
- AI Manager
- Connect knowledge, tools, channels and notifications
- Inbox overview: what Needs Attention and closed conversations look like.
- Troubleshooting AI agents: hands over too often or never, changes not taking effect.