How your assistant opens a conversation

Someone calls your number and your assistant says hello, gives its name, and asks how it can help. Someone opens the chat bubble on your website and the same thing happens — the assistant speaks first, in the same voice, using the same words it would use on the phone.

That opening is not a setting you fill in. It is written into your assistant’s instructions, the same place its personality and its rules live, so there is only one thing to keep up to date. Change how your assistant introduces itself and the change lands everywhere at once: calls, web chat, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger.

On WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger your assistant cannot speak first. Meta does not allow a business to message someone who has not messaged them. So on those channels the greeting arrives as the opening of the first reply instead — the customer says “do you deliver?”, and the answer starts with the introduction and then answers the question.

The result is the same everywhere: the first thing a customer hears from you is a proper greeting. Only the timing differs, and only where Meta’s rules force it.

What decides what it says

Your assistant’s instructions. If they say to greet by time of day and give the business name, that is what a caller hears and what a web-chat visitor reads.

Two things get filled in automatically before your assistant speaks:

What	Where it comes from
Time-of-day greeting	Your business timezone — “Good morning” before noon, “Good afternoon” until 5pm, “Good evening” after
The customer’s name	Their phone number, matched against your contacts or member list

The name only appears when the channel gives your assistant a phone number to match on. A call does. WhatsApp does. A website visitor is anonymous until they tell you who they are, so a first-time web-chat greeting will not use a name.

When it greets again

Your assistant greets on every call, and the same idea applies to chat: a conversation that has been quiet for 8 hours is treated as a new one, and the next message opens it with a fresh greeting.

That means:

• A customer who reloads your website mid-conversation is not greeted again — the conversation carries on where it was.
• A customer who comes back the next day is greeted again, exactly as they would be if they called twice.

There is no re-introduction in the middle of a conversation. If you are seeing one, see Troubleshooting below.

Web chat: the fallback line

The chat widget’s embed code can carry a data-greeting line:

<script src="…/widgets/chat/v1.js"
  data-tenant="…" data-bot="…" data-key="…"
  data-greeting="Hi! How can we help?"
  async></script>

This used to be the greeting. It no longer is — your assistant writes its own now. The line survives as a fallback, shown only when your assistant has nothing to say: the conversation is already active, or the service is briefly busy, or the connection fails. Most visitors will never see it.

You can leave it as it is. If you want it to match your assistant’s voice, keep it short and generic — it is a safety net, not a script.

Testing it

Where to find it: Dashboard → Bots → your bot → Test the chat bot.

The tester now opens the way a real conversation does: the greeting appears before you type anything. Two things worth knowing:

1. To hear the greeting again, press Clear. That starts a new conversation, the same as hanging up and calling back.
2. To hear it greet someone by name, put a real phone number in From (caller phone) first, then press Clear. The greeting is generated fresh, so it will use whatever your contact or member list holds for that number.

The opening turn in the tester never runs your bot’s real tools, even with Run this bot’s real tools ticked — a greeting has no business firing a booking or a webhook.

What it costs

An opening greeting is a real reply from your assistant, so it is counted and billed like any other message. This matters most for web chat: every visitor who opens the chat bubble now starts a conversation, where previously nothing happened until they typed.

If your widget gets a lot of curious clicks that go nowhere, you will see those in your usage. They are ordinary conversations in your inbox, each containing the greeting your assistant sent.

Troubleshooting

My assistant introduces itself in the middle of a conversation

The conversation was quiet for more than 8 hours, so the next message counted as a new one. This is deliberate — the alternative is a customer who is greeted once and then never again. If the gap is wrong for your business, ask support to change it.

The web chat says something different from what my assistant says on calls

You are almost certainly seeing the data-greeting fallback, which only appears when the real greeting could not be generated. Reload the page and open the chat again. If it happens every time, the widget is not reaching your assistant — check that your web chat channel is switched on.

The greeting does not use the customer’s name

Check, in order:

1. Is there a phone number on this channel? Web-chat visitors are anonymous until they give you one.
2. Is that number in your contacts or member list? Match the format you actually store — the number is normalised before it is looked up, so spacing and country codes do not matter, but a missing record does.
3. Do your assistant’s instructions ask for the name? The name is available; whether it is used is up to the instructions.

I do not want my assistant to introduce itself at all

Take the introduction out of its instructions. The assistant will still be given its turn to speak — it will simply say whatever its instructions tell it to, which can be very short.