Chatbot versus agent: the practical difference
A chatbot answers. An agent resolves. When a customer asks where their order is, a chatbot explains your shipping policy; an agent looks up the order and tells them it is on the van. When a customer wants to change an appointment, a chatbot gives them a phone number; an agent offers available slots and books one.
The other difference is supervision. Agents are built to hand off: rules detect frustration, out-of-scope topics or repeated failure and route the conversation to a human with context, then resume when the human is done.
The components that matter
Knowledge: the agent must ingest your website, documents and Q&A and stay in sync when they change. Look for live index status and automatic reindexing.
Actions: plain-English descriptions of your API endpoints with typed parameters, so the agent can fetch and change data. A deterministic layer for reference numbers (regex webhooks) avoids hallucinated statuses.
Guardrails: blocked topics, prompt-injection detection, leak checks and a fallback message you control.
Channels and inbox: web, Slack, WhatsApp and email sharing one knowledge base, with a shared inbox for takeover.
Analytics: resolution rate, sentiment and topics tell you what to fix in your docs and where humans are still needed.
Try it on your own website
Paste your URL. We crawl it and hand you a working agent in minutes. Free plan, no card.
What it costs and how to think about ROI
Pricing models vary: flat monthly fees with message credits, per-resolution fees, or per-seat licences plus AI add-ons. Per-resolution pricing sounds fair but makes busy months expensive and creates incentive problems around what counts as resolved.
For ROI, estimate the share of tickets that are repetitive and data-dependent (often 60–80%), multiply by average handling time and loaded hourly cost, and compare with the plan price. Most SMEs find the agent pays for itself in the first month.
UK and EU considerations
Ask where conversation data is stored, whether your content is used to train models, and whether the vendor will sign a DPA. UK/EU hosting simplifies GDPR documentation considerably. Billing in GBP with VAT invoices is a small thing that saves finance a recurring headache.
How Threadbox fits
Threadbox is an AI customer support agent built in the UK: knowledge from any source, actions and regex webhooks, guardrails, every major channel, a shared inbox with rule-based escalation, analytics and a daily digest. It is hosted in the UK/EU and priced flat in GBP.