A chat widget that sounds like a call centre script tells your customer they are talking to software bolted onto a website. Which they are, but the point of a small shop is that dealing with you does not feel like that.
The tone controls exist because a plant nursery, a legal-forms business and a skate shop should not have the same assistant.
Give it a name
Call it whatever you like, or leave it unnamed. If you name it, it introduces itself; if you do not, it simply gets on with helping.
Naming it is not decoration. A named assistant is one customers refer back to, and one they treat as part of the shop rather than a widget.
Five voices
- Calm for measured and reassuring.
- Friendly for warm and approachable. This is the default.
- Chatty for casual and upbeat.
- Professional for polished and precise.
- Playful for light humour and personality.
The voice shapes how the assistant writes without touching what it is allowed to say. A playful assistant is still bound by the same rule that every answer has to come from your own content.
Your own greeting
Write the first thing customers see, or leave it and Helpie composes a sensible one from your shop name.
The greeting is rendered on the page without an API call, so it costs nothing and appears instantly.
Manners, in your words
There is a free-text box for behaviour guidance, and it is more useful than it looks.
This is where you write the things that are true about how you want customers handled but are not facts on a page. "If someone asks about wholesale, tell them to email Jo directly." "Do not push people towards the subscription." "If someone is upset about a delivery, apologise before explaining."
The assistant follows that in its own voice rather than reciting it, and it treats those as things to handle rather than reasons to escalate.
Speaking as the business
The assistant always speaks in the first person plural. "We ship on Tuesdays", not "the store ships on Tuesdays". It is representing you, and third-person distance reads as a bot that does not work here.
It will not pretend to be a person, though. If a customer asks, it says so. Getting caught claiming to be human costs more trust than never claiming it.
When it hands over
You can set who the handover is from: a name, a role, and pronouns. "Sarah, who runs the shop, will pick this up" lands very differently from "a member of our team will be in touch."
Pronouns are set explicitly rather than guessed, and default to they/them.
Colours and shape
The widget takes its colours, fonts, corner radius and shadows from your Brand Hub settings, alongside every other Tracksies surface. Set your brand once.
The launcher itself can be a plain disk, an icon, or an image you upload, and the header text is yours to write.