What is Guides?

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Bringing AI into your business can feel daunting like something only achievable with deep technical expertise or a dedicated engineering team. With Sidekick Guides, customer teams can build, manage, and improve outcome driven, customer first workflows using natural language. Define workflows in plain language, set clear guardrails, and use real time feedback to inform continuous improvements that drive more resolutions and conversions as you evolve. Guides is an intuitive, no-code interface for setting up and configuring AI workflows. It enables customer service teams to define how Sidekick should respond to customers, retrieve information, take action, and escalate issues—using natural language and without technical support.

Where many AI tools often rely on technical teams for setup and maintenance, creating bottlenecks and slowing down the progress, Sidekick Guides takes a different approach. Creating and refining Sidekick behavior with Guides is as easy as writing a support document to train a new Agent, giving the team closest to the customer full control over how AI behaves.

With a natural language interface and real-time testing, customer service teams can configure, launch, and refine AI workflows quickly. Whether it’s adjusting tone, refining escalation logic, or rolling out a new policy. Guides turns AI into a business-owned asset, not a technical project.

A flowchart illustrating the steps to define, train, adjust, and analyze AI workflows.

Sidekick Guides works together with Sidekick Journeys to further simplify AI training and optimization for teams. Where Guides allows Admins and Team Managers to easily set up and manage AI workflows, Journeys delivers analytics and insights that help teams continuously monitor and improve Sidekick’s performance. Together, they create a complete cycle of setup, performance tracking, and refinement that gives CX teams full ownership of their AI strategy without relying on technical teams for day-to-day updates.

Benefits of Guides

Guides makes AI accessible to Everyone, Not Just Engineers

Guides puts AI configuration in the hands of the people closest to the customer—with a natural language interface and familiar workflow logic that requires no technical expertise.

Always Current, Never Bottlenecked

Teams can set up Sidekick using existing documentation and make updates on the fly—so AI stays current as policies, products, or priorities change.

Built to Reflect Your Business

From escalation paths to brand tone, Guides lets teams define how Sidekick behaves based on real-world CX workflows and values—not rigid logic trees.

Powerful Automation Without Technical Overhead

Sidekick can fetch data, take action, and resolve customer issues across systems—configured entirely by CX, without waiting on IT or burning out engineering.

High-level overview of how Guides work

Guides work quite simply from the surface, making integrating AI into your workflow easier than ever before. Sidekick identifies which Guide to use based on the type of Customer inquiry and follows the outlined workflow in order to help the Customer, just as an Agent would.

Gladly interface showing draft options for customer service guides and order management.

Guides works to achieve three main objectives:

  1. Answer Customer questions

  2. Look up key Customer information and details

  3. Take action to resolve Customer inquiries

To do this, Sidekick Guides employs two types of Guides:

Guide Type

Purpose

Answer Guides

Answer Customer questions using information available as Public Answers.

Example – an Answer Guide may be leveraged to address a Customer asking “What is your return policy?”

Action Guides

Guides configured to look up Customer details, take actions or reply information from external systems (e.g., an OMS) and engage with the Customer along the way.

Example – an Action Guide may be used to provide a Customer with tracking updates or cancel an order.

Sidekick Guides uses both the steps outlined in Guide configurations as well as additional guidance provided by Admins or Team Managers to help craft Sidekick’s tone and disposition when communicating with the Customer. Guides will quickly hand off to an Agent if necessary, and a summary of the automated engagement as well as the reason for the hand off is available to Agents in the Conversation Timeline.

Utilize the same Guides across all Channels

Sidekick Guides can be used across all Channels. This means there’s no need to create Channel-specific Guides for Sidekick. For instance, if you create a Guide helping Customers track an order, Sidekick will apply that Guide across all Channels. You manage and control how Sidekick operates through one user-friendly UX.