How an AI follow-up agent works
An AI follow-up agent is a team member that chases the leads you assign to it by email, WhatsApp and SMS, and answers when they reply.
You’ll need: A paid plan (AI Follow-Up Agents are not on the free plan), and credits available.
An AI follow-up agent works your leads for you: it sends a planned series of messages, and when a lead writes back, it reads the reply and decides what happens next.
#The agent is a team member
An agent sits on your Members list like a person does. It has a name, its own email address and a place in the assignment list. What makes it an agent is that it belongs to a group of AI agents.
Because it is a member, you hand it work the same way you hand work to a person: assign a lead to it. Nothing starts until you do.
#Two flows do the work
Every agent is driven by flows on the AI Agent channel of the Flow Designer. There are two kinds:
| Flow | What it does |
|---|---|
| AI Tasks | The outbound sequence. Send a message, wait, send the next one. |
| Email Received, WhatsApp Received, SMS Received | What happens when the lead replies on that channel. |
The AI Builder creates both kinds for you when you build a follow-up sequence. You can open them in the Flow Designer and change any step. See The AI Tasks flow and Handle replies with response flows.
#The life of one lead
- You assign the lead to the agent. Its Automation disabled/enabled switch must be on.
- Within about 15 minutes, the AI Tasks flow starts for that lead and sends the first message.
- The flow waits, sends, waits, sends, until it reaches its last step.
- If the lead replies, the sequence stops for good. The reply is read and sorted into a category, and the matching response flow runs instead.
Each lead runs through the AI Tasks flow once. Finishing it, or replying, does not start it again. To send a lead through from the beginning, open the lead and choose Restart AI flow.
#Where replies have to arrive
| Channel | The agent sees a reply when |
|---|---|
| The lead writes to the agent’s own email address. Replies to any other address never reach it. | |
| The lead messages one of your connected numbers, the lead is assigned to the agent, and Pause AI automation is off. | |
| SMS | The lead texts your SMS number and is assigned to the agent. |
#What the AI writes with
When the agent writes a message itself, it draws on:
- your Business Info prompt, which says what you sell;
- the instruction prompts for the kind of message it is writing;
- the Instructions box on its AI agent group;
- what it knows about the lead: name, business, notes and the conversation so far.
You shape all of that on the Prompts screen. See Create an AI agent and tell it how to write.
#Stopping an agent for one lead
Any of these stops the sequence:
- The lead replies.
- You assign the lead to someone else.
- You turn off the lead’s Automation disabled/enabled switch.
For WhatsApp only, Pause AI automation stops the agent answering across the whole account.
#Credits
Every message the AI writes, and every reply it reads and sorts, uses AI credits. If your balance reaches zero, running sequences stop and do not resume on their own. Use Restart AI flow on the leads you want to pick up again.
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