Route Web Chat to an Agent Stack

By default, a new Web Chat widget has no routing destination, so its conversations land in the General inbox; pick a team and they land in that team’s queue instead. If you want an Agent Stack to handle them autonomously — answering common questions, escalating to a human only when needed — you point Route Conversations To at that stack in the widget’s Routing tab.

Before you start

• The widget exists. If not, create one first.
• The Agent Stack you want to route to is already built and tested in Settings → Agent Stacks.

Steps

1. Open Settings → Web Chat and click the pencil (edit) icon on your widget’s row.
2. Open the Routing tab.
3. Open the Route Conversations To dropdown. There is no separate AI on/off switch — the destination you pick is what decides.
4. Under Agent Stacks, pick the stack that should own incoming conversations. The picker shows every Agent Stack in your tenant, and choosing one switches the widget to AI routing.
5. Optionally open the General tab and enable Share page location with Agent Stacks. When this is on, Atender sends the visitor’s sanitized page origin and path, plus an optional host-supplied page module label when your site provides one, as grounding context so the stack can answer page-specific questions. Return to the Routing tab if you still need to finish the AI destination setup.
6. After-hours routing is only available when the primary destination is a team. If a team’s after-hours routing sends visitors to an Agent Stack, optionally write an after-hours greeting. This greeting is shown once when the visitor starts a conversation after hours. Leave it empty if you do not want to send a greeting.
   Use {opening_hours} to insert the configured opening hours.
   Use {next_open} to insert the next time the team opens.
   Localized versions are generated automatically for your additional languages; review or edit them in the Translations tab.
7. Click Update Widget.

The next conversation that starts from this widget goes straight to the Agent Stack, not to the human team’s queue.

Verify it worked

• Open your site, start a chat from the widget, and send a message.
• The Agent Stack should reply within a few seconds.
• If you enabled Share page location with Agent Stacks, page-aware answers should use the visitor’s current page as context. Existing widgets keep the old behavior when this setting is off.
• In Atender’s inbox, the conversation shows the Agent Stack as the responder rather than appearing on the team’s queue.

How escalation works

The Agent Stack handles the conversation until one of its escalation triggers fires. Escalation typically means:

• The Agent Stack hands the conversation to a specialist agent inside the same stack, which is invisible to the visitor — they see one continuous chat.
• The Agent Stack hands the conversation to a human team for further handling. At that point the conversation appears in the team’s queue and an agent picks it up.

Off-topic abuse is not a human escalation path for Web Chat AI routing. If a visitor repeatedly asks unrelated questions, Atender may end and archive the webchat with a fixed “business questions only” closing line, so the human queue stays focused on business support.

Escalation triggers are configured inside the Agent Stack itself — see Agent Stacks.

Mixed routing

A widget routes to either the default team or an Agent Stack — not both at the same time. If you want some conversations to skip AI (for example, “billing” inquiries should go straight to humans), build that logic inside the Agent Stack. The stack can escalate certain topics immediately rather than attempting to handle them.

When to use AI routing vs team routing

• AI routing is right when you have an Agent Stack that’s been tested against your real use cases, your knowledge base is in good shape, and you want first response in seconds rather than minutes.
• Team routing is right when human judgment is required from the first message — high-touch sales, sensitive complaints, regulated industries.

You can always switch back — set Route Conversations To back to a team and incoming conversations will go straight to that team.

Troubleshooting

• Symptom: Route Conversations To shows no Agent Stacks group. Fix: You haven’t built any Agent Stacks yet. Go to Settings → Agent Stacks and create one.

• Symptom: Routing is set to AI but conversations still go to the team. Fix: Confirm you saved after picking the Agent Stack in Route Conversations To. If you did, the widget may be cached — hard-refresh the visitor-facing page or test from a private browsing window.

• Symptom: The Agent Stack replies, but escalation to a human isn’t working. Fix: Escalation behavior is internal to the Agent Stack. Open the stack in Settings → Agent Stacks and review its escalation rules.

See also

• Agent Stacks
• The Web Chat widget