New to Sidekick? Start Here

Sidekick helps your customers get fast and accurate answers automatically. This overview gives managers and admins a high-level overview of everything required to set up, customize, test, and monitor Sidekick.

If you’re new to Sidekick, start here. Completing the steps below will set you up to get rolling with Sidekick as quickly as possible:

How the Sidekick Guides interface works
How to customize Sidekick’s tone, behavior, and how to escalate
How to set up the Questions and Recommendations Guide
Note: This is the key Guide you need to go live. Get this Guide ready first, so you can start using Sidekick right away.
How to test your changes
How to monitor performance once Sidekick is live

Think of this page as your go-to resource: a concise list of what to review to set up Sidekick smoothly and confidently.

Understand the Sidekick Guides Interface

Sidekick Profiles

Each organization may have one or more Sidekick Profiles, and each profile represents a distinct configuration of how Sidekick should behave for a given use case or customer experience. Profiles allow you to tailor Sidekick’s personality, tone, and escalation behavior to different teams, brands, or channels.

Every Sidekick Profile contains a set of three Behavioral Tiles—Basics, How to Speak to Customers, and When to Get More Help—which define how Sidekick communicates and makes decisions. Any updates you make within a profile apply only to that specific profile, giving you flexibility to customize Sidekick for different workflows.

Behavioral Tiles

Sidekick is powered by Guides–workflows that shape how it engages with Customers. The core Guides interface is comprised of three key behavior tiles, which influence Sidekick’s overall personality and decision-making.

Overview of Retale Sidekick features including basics, customer communication, and help guidance.

Basics

The Basics tile defines brand and identity of Sidekick. This includes:

How Sidekick introduces itself
Your company name
Basic company description

This information establishes a persona for Sidekick.

How to Speak to Customers

The How to Speak to Customers tile defines Sidekick’s tone and voice. Use it to describe:

Phrases Sidekick should use
Phrases it should avoid
How it should respond when customers are frustrated or confused
Any Channel-specific variations, such as differences between Voice, Chat, and Email

Each piece of advice can apply to one or more Channels, and to one or more Guides.

Example Advice
Response style: suggest replies are clear, succinct, confident, intelligent, empowering, helpful, informative.
Tone: maintain a consistently friendly and welcoming tone to ensure Customers feel valued and understood.
Voice: speak in active voice.
Response length: suggest responses are concise and directly address the Customer's question in the first two sentences.

When to Get More Help

The When to Get More Help tile determines when Sidekick should escalate to a human agent. Examples include:

Customers who repeatedly ask for a human
Mentions of legal concerns
Sensitive or complex situations that require live support

You can also customize an optional handoff message that Sidekick sends when it escalates. This is especially helpful in Chat, where it serves as a smooth transition before an Agent joins the Conversation.

Individual Guides

With Sidekick Guides, you can create workflows that help Sidekick handle specific customer interactions effectively. You can describe workflows in plain language, set rules and boundaries, and use real-time feedback to make ongoing improvements over time.

While many Guides will be used to take specific actions like cancelling an order, the Questions and Recommendations template is designed as a Guide to provide information to Customers. The Questions and Recommendations is the guide you should complete first in order to go live with Sidekick.

Tester

The Test button lets you simulate customer conversations so you can confirm how Sidekick will behave before going live. Use it to quickly experiment, refine your Guides, and ensure Sidekick responds as expected.

Prepare your Questions and Recommendations Guide

To use Sidekick, you need a Questions & Recommendations Guide equipped to handle customer inquiries.

Every Sidekick setup includes a Questions & Recommendations Guide by default. This Guide is the fastest, simplest way to get Sidekick live. It handles general customer inquiries using the information already available in your Public Answers and public website content, allowing you to deliver immediate value before building any additional Guides.

The Questions & Recommendations Guide is ideal when:

The inquiry can be answered using standard information in Public Answers
Your website already provides the needed details
The scenario doesn’t require task-specific logic, complex workflows, or access to external integrations or third-party systems

You can always create additional Guides for specialized use cases, but Questions & Recommendations is the best place to start for any organization—a reliable foundation for getting Sidekick up and running quickly.

Set Up the Questions and Recommendations Guide

Manage the Knowledge Sources that the Questions & Recommendations Guide will use as the basis for its information.

A. Public Answers

You can specify:

Language
Audience

You can determine a focused set of Answers, if you prefer to limit the content Sidekick can use. This ensures Sidekick only relies on the information you approve.

Audience for Sidekick
Sidekick Answers uses Public Answers to assist customers, so a stronger set of Answers improves its effectiveness. For content you’d like Sidekick to use but not make public, create a dedicated Audience—such as “Sidekick Answers”—with the appropriate materials.

B. Websites

Sidekick can use website pages to enrich its responses, which is helpful for product details and other content you may not want to duplicate in Public Answers.

You can:

Select from a list of available website URLs
Optionally include or exclude specific URL paths to refine what Sidekick should reference

This allows you to give Sidekick access to the right website content while filtering out pages that are not useful for Customer interactions.

Test Your Sidekick Responses

Once your Guide is configured, use the built-in tester to simulate real customer questions. The tester allows you to:

Type questions as if you were a Customer
Review how Sidekick would respond
Adjust your Guide and test again

This helps you refine tone, content sources, and escalation logic before going live.

Customer inquires about rain repellent jackets and return options in chat conversation.

Track Sidekick Performance

Once your Sidekick is live, Journeys is your go-to place for quickly gauging how it’s performing and identifying opportunities for improvement. Use the Guides Performance page as an initial gut check on what’s working and what may need adjustment before you dive into more advanced optimizations. For more detailed guidance, see the Journeys help documentation.

In Journeys, you can review key metrics such as:

Conversations handled by Sidekick – see how much volume Sidekick is managing on its own.
Hand offs – track which Conversations required human intervention.
Resolution rates by Guide or Channel – understand which Guides or Channels are most effective.

You can also drill into individual Conversations to review detailed interactions, including Sidekick’s responses and the reasons for hand offs.

Regularly reviewing this reporting gives you clear insights into areas for improvement, helping you refine Guides, improve responses, and ensure a consistently high-quality Customer experience.

Overview of customer inquiries, resolutions, and guide performance metrics in a dashboard.

Sidekick Conversations

The Sidekick Conversations page provides a complete view of recent interactions between customers and Sidekick, helping you monitor performance and refine your Guides. Key features include:

Conversation Overview: See how Sidekick responded, whether it resolved an issue, or escalated to a human agent.
Reasoning Insight: Understand why Sidekick made a particular decision in each interaction.
Filters & Search: Focus on specific customers, Guides, or types of conversations for deeper analysis.
Performance Monitoring: Identify trends and opportunities to improve Guides and Sidekick behavior.

Video Walkthrough

Once you’ve gone through the items above and are ready to dive deeper, this video provides a more detailed walkthrough of the setup process.