Actions
Actions overview
Actions are the tools your AI agent can use mid-conversation to capture leads, hand off to your team, book meetings, open cases and call your own systems.
Knowledge lets your agent answer questions. Actions let it do things. An action is a tool your agent can reach for in the middle of a conversation: save a customer's details as a lead, hand the chat to a teammate, book a meeting, look up a product, open a case, or call your own API with details it has gathered.
You manage every action from Actions in the sidebar. The page has two groups: System actions, which come with every workspace, and Your actions, which you add yourself.
System actions
System actions are built in, included on every plan, and never counted against your action limit. They can't be deleted, but you can rename them, rewrite their instructions and choose which details they collect.
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Collect Leads | Saves the details a customer shares onto their contact and flags them as a lead. |
| Escalate to Human | Stops automatic replies and moves the conversation into your team's inbox queue. |
| Wrap up conversation | Checks whether the customer needs anything else, and closes the conversation once they're done. |
Escalate to Human is marked Always on and can't be switched off, so your agent always has a way to bring in a person. The other two can be switched on or off with the toggle on their card.
Your actions
These are actions you add, configure and delete. Click Add action, pick a type, and click Continue.
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Calendly | Shares live availability and books a meeting without leaving the chat. |
| Cal.com | The same, for calendars that live in Cal.com. |
| Slack | Posts an alert into a team channel so a person can step in. |
| Intercom | Files an Intercom ticket with the full context of the conversation. |
| Shopify — Products | Looks up products, prices and availability and shows them as cards. |
| Shopify — Checkout link | Puts the chosen products in a cart and sends a link to your checkout. |
| Create case | Opens a case for work that continues after the chat. |
| Custom action | Calls your own HTTP endpoint with the details the agent gathers. |
| Custom button | Shows a tappable link button in the conversation. |
In the picker, some types show a badge:
- Needs an account — the action runs on an account you connect in Settings → Integrations first (Calendly, Cal.com, Slack and Intercom).
- Connected — that account is already linked.
- Creates records — every time the action runs it creates something real in another system, such as a booking or a ticket.
You can add more than one action of the same type. For example, one Calendly action for demos and another for onboarding calls, or one Create case action for refunds and another for bug reports.
Only workspace owners and admins can add, edit, switch on or off, and delete actions.
Plan limits
The number of actions you can add yourself depends on your plan. The limit is counted across your whole organisation, not per workspace. System actions are never counted.
| Plan | Your actions |
|---|---|
| Starter | 2 |
| Growth | 8 |
| Pro | 20 |
| Scale | 50 |
The tile at the top of the Actions page shows how many you've used. If your organisation ends up over the limit (for example after a plan change), nothing is deleted: your oldest actions up to the limit keep working, and the agent stops using the rest until you upgrade or delete some. See Plans and limits.
How your agent decides when to use an action
Every action has a Name and Instructions. The instructions are the action's own prompt: they tell your agent when to reach for it, when not to, and what to gather first. They can be up to 500 characters. When you add an action, OrbitBase fills in starter instructions you can keep or rewrite.
On each customer message, your agent reads the instructions of every action that is switched on and calls each one whose situation applies. It can use more than one in the same reply, for example capturing a lead and booking a meeting together.
Be specific about when an action should, and shouldn't, fire. "Use this when the customer asks for a refund on an order that has already arrived" works better than "Use this for refunds".
Details to collect
Most actions have a Details to collect section: the questions your agent asks before it runs the action. Each detail has a name, an Answer type (Text, Email, Phone, Number, Link, Date or Choices) and a Required switch. Required details block the action until the customer answers them. An action can collect up to 12 details.
For Collect Leads and Custom action you can also turn on Ask with a form, which shows every detail at once as a form on your website widget and in the Playground. Social channels have no forms, so the agent keeps asking one question at a time there.
When it's done
Actions that finish something (a booking, an alert, a ticket, a case, or a successful call to your endpoint) have a When it's done setting:
- Keep chatting — your agent stays in the conversation.
- Close the conversation — your agent says goodbye and closes it. It counts as resolved by your agent.
- Hand to the team — your agent stops replying and the conversation goes to your team's queue.
Switching actions on and off
Each card has a switch. When an action is switched off, your agent can't see it or call it, but its settings are kept. The tile at the top of the page shows how many actions are live for your agent.
Health on action cards
Each card shows a short status line:
- Active or Collects 3 details — switched on and ready.
- Switched off — the agent won't use it.
- Needs setup — something required is missing, such as an event, a channel or an endpoint. Click Finish setup to complete it. Your agent can't use it until you do.
- Failing — the action failed three times in a row. The card turns yellow, shows the last error, and says when it last worked. Your agent still offers it, and customers are told it couldn't be completed, so fix it or switch it off.
When an action starts failing, OrbitBase can also email you. Manage this under Action failing in your notification settings.