Configure the Quinn Agent

Turn on, pause and configure Quinn's customer-facing Agent in Messenger: tone, knowledge, guidance rules, skills, actions and handoff to your team.

Quinn's Agent answers customer questions inside Messenger, the chat in your widget, and hands the conversation to your team when it can't help. This article shows workspace admins how to turn it on and control what it knows and says.

Find it at Admin > Settings > Agent, in the AI & Automation section.

Before you start

An AI model. On Quackback Cloud, Quinn is included from the Pro plan. Self-hosted installs need an AI endpoint configured.
The Support module. Messenger replies need the support inbox. If the Support module is off, the Agent page shows Turn on inbox. You can also turn it on in Admin > Settings > General, under Modules.

Turn it on or pause it

The top of the Agent page shows whether Quinn is Replying in Messenger.

Click Pause Agent to take Quinn offline without losing your configuration. The card then reads "Paused, not replying in Messenger".
Click Resume to bring it back.

Configure the Agent

The Agent page has three tabs.

Tab	What you configure
Basics	Quinn's name and avatar, tone, response length, and additional instructions
Knowledge	Which content Quinn can draw on when it answers
Guidance	Rules that steer Quinn's behavior in specific situations

Basics

Set Quinn's tone and how long its replies should be. Additional instructions is free text for anything the other fields don't cover, such as "Never quote a price" or "Always ask for the order number first."

Knowledge

The Agent can only use customer-safe sources: published help center articles, feedback posts from public boards, published changelog entries, and live system status. It never sees internal notes, past conversations or ticket history.

Only the help center is on by default. Turn on the others as you build out that content. See Knowledge sources for the full list.

Note: The feedback posts source only includes posts from public boards. Posts on private boards never appear in Quinn's replies.

Guidance

Guidance rules are structured. Each rule has a name, an instruction, and either Always on or a condition that describes when it applies (for example, "the customer mentions a refund"). Priority decides which rule wins when two could apply.

Tip: Keep guidance specific. "Offer a 10% discount if the customer threatens to cancel" works. "Be nice" gives Quinn nothing to act on.

Rules share a combined character budget per agent, so a few focused rules work better than many long ones.

Skills

Skills are procedures Quinn follows for specific situations, such as processing a refund request or collecting details for a bug report. Manage them in Admin > Settings > Skills and click New skill.

Name: how the skill appears in the list.
When to use: one line that is always visible to Quinn. It decides when the skill loads, so describe the situation clearly.
Instructions: the procedure itself, in Markdown. You can mention connector or built-in tools by name.

Actions

Actions let Quinn do things, not just answer: close a resolved conversation, open a ticket, share a feedback post, or call your own tools. Set what the Agent may do in Admin > Settings > Connectors. See Give Quinn actions.

Handing off to your team

When Quinn can't answer, it hands the conversation to your team instead of guessing. A handoff is an event your workspace can react to:

A workflow with the AI agent handed off to a human trigger can route the conversation to a team or raise its priority.
A webhook subscribed to assistant.handed_off can notify an external system.

Tip: The Handoff triage and Route by issue type templates are built on the handoff trigger. See Start from a workflow template.