Understand KIQ Conversations
Last Update: Oct 2024 • Est. Read Time: 6 MINKIQ Conversations is a Kustomer IQ add-on for Customer Assist, our intelligent conversational assistant (chatbot) you can build using a visual editor. With assistants, you can improve customer experiences and eliminate time-consuming tasks by pairing human support with automation capabilities on your Chat, SMS, and WhatsApp channels.
Here is a quick summary of the KIQ Conversations add-on:
Available Plan(s) | Paid & Free |
Included (Free) Plan | Routing chatbots with Lite assistants (these are included as part of your base platform subscription fees and may be subject to limits). |
Premium (Paid) Plan | Build advanced chatbots with generative AI and automation capabilities with Premium assistants |
Unit | KIQ Conversation Conversation that was not transferred to an agent, and the customer didn’t create another conversation in any channel in 24 hours. See What is a KIQ Conversation for more details. |
Pricing | See Pricing details below |
Note: These changes do not apply to customers with active subscriptions to one of our legacy assistant offerings:
- KIQ for Self-Service
- KIQ Conversations with Assistant Pro
In this article
- What are the benefits?
- What is a KIQ Conversation?
- Pricing details
- Set up usage notifications
- Examples of KIQ Conversations
What are the benefits?
Our principle when designing conversational assistants is to Start Small, Start Today. You can start by designing a routing assistant with Lite assistants, and then expand to our AI-powered Premium assistants from there, one use case at a time with usage-based pricing.
✅ Free unlimited routing bots
Lite assistants allow you to eliminate manual triage and expedite resolution by collecting information upfront and routing conversations based on user input and data.
Lite assistants are free and available to any business customer as part of a paid platform plan, making getting started with Customer Assist easier than ever. Business customers on our Enterprise and Ultimate plans receive unlimited Lite assistants. Other platform plans may be subject to limits.
You can convert your assistants from Lite to Premium anytime and start building automation chatbots without a commitment.
See About Lite and Premium assistants for more information.
✅ Level up with paid AI-powered, automation chatbots
Unlock advanced automation and AI capabilities with Premium assistants, our paid offering that has all of the features found in Lite assistants PLUS the ability to:
- Use AI to respond to customer inquiries using the information found in your public knowledge base
Notes: The AI response interaction is only available for the chat and WhatsApp channels.
- Automate end-to-end support workflows for top use cases such as order status, address updates, and delivery scheduling
- Provide the end customer with support articles related to their issue
- Deliver quick resolution by automatically detecting and routing conversations based on customer intent
- Free up agent inboxes by automatically ending conversations
No commitment is required to start using Premium assistants.
✅ Your assistant keeps running even during your busiest season.
We’ll charge you for using your Premium assistants at our standard per KIQ Conversation rate. Our progressive pricing model adapts to your needs, even when managing a high volume of conversations. This ensures you pay based on your actual usage, and your price will progressively decrease the more you use, ensuring you receive the most value for your investment.
What is a KIQ Conversation?
An automated conversation that was not transferred to an agent and the customer didn’t create another conversation in any channel in 24 hours.
A KIQ Conversation is a conversation that has at least one back-and-forth message sent between your customer and the Assistant and is not transferred to an agent using the Human Takeover interaction within 24 hours after the customer’s first message.
A conversation where your customer performs any of these actions within 24 hours after their first message is excluded from being counted as a KIQ Conversation:
- Creates another conversation in any channel.
- Provides negative feedback to an AI response interaction.
- Provides negative feedback to a Request feedback interaction.
- Provides negative feedback during the Article Deflection interaction, or abandons the conversation without selecting any of the articles shown.
- Abandons the conversation while the assistant gathers Email, Phone, or Name attributes.
- Abandons the conversation when asked about their issue during an Article Deflection or while selecting an object in an Object Selector interaction.
Note: The AI Response, Request feedback, and Object Selector interactions are only available on the chat and WhatsApp channels for Premium assistants. Article Deflection is also only available on the chat channel for Premium assistants.
Pricing details
Business customers who wish to automate conversations using Premium assistants can pay as they go at our progressive per KIQ Conversation rate. As defined above, only KIQ Conversations using Premium assistants will count towards your monthly usage and be billed at our progressive per KIQ Conversation rate.
Our progressive pricing model starts at $0.75 per conversation and is designed to adapt to your usage. As your business uses more KIQ Conversations, the price will progressively decrease as you enter into higher tiers based on your total usage. Your total monthly charge will be calculated based on the proportion of your KIQ Conversations within each band based on your total KIQ Conversations in any given month.
Conversations per month | Discount | Price per conversation |
First 0 - 500 | 0.0% | $0.75 |
Next 501 - 2,500 | 6.67% | $0.70 |
Next 2,501 - 10,000 | 13.33% | $0.65 |
Next 10,001 - 25,000 | 20.00% | $0.60 |
Next 25,001 - 50,000 | 26.67% | $0.55 |
Next 50,001 - 100,000 | 33.33% | $0.50 |
Next 100,001 - 250,000 | 40.0% | $0.45 |
Next 250,001+ | 46.67% | $0.40 |
For example, let's say you used 4000 KIQ Conversations in December:
- For the first 500 conversations: 500 x $0.75 = $375
- For the next 2,000 conversations: 2000 x $0.70 = $1,400
- For the remaining 1,500 conversations: 1,500 x $0.65 = $975
- Add up all costs for the monthly total: $2,750
See this page for more information.
Set up usage notifications
You can set up a monthly threshold for KIQ Conversations to help manage your monthly cost. You will receive email notifications alerting you once you reach 50%, 80%, and 100% of the threshold set. When setting the threshold, you'll see an estimate of your monthly price.
To avoid incurring additional charges that month, you can turn your Premium assistant(s) off from the Customer Assist page by going to and selecting Unpublish all Premium assistants.
To change your threshold, go to Settings > Billing > Manage Subscription and select Edit usage notification in the KIC Conversations monthly add-on section.
Examples of KIQ Conversations
Below are examples of common chat scenarios to help explain what counts as a KIQ conversation.
Scenario #1: Customer asks about the status of their order and receives an automated answer. The conversation is marked as done automatically using Assistant Abandoned Settings.
Customer didn’t create another conversation | |
Customer didn’t abandon the conversation after being asked for their email, name, or phone number | |
Customer didn’t provide negative feedback in Request feedback or Article deflection interactions | |
Customer didn’t abandon the conversation without selecting an article during the Article deflection interaction | |
Assistant didn't transfer the conversation to an agent | |
Considered a KIQ Conversation? |
Scenario #2: Customer asks a question and the assistant detects the intent of the question and provides an answer to the customer. The conversation is automatically marked as done using Assistant Abandoned Settings.
Customer didn’t create another conversation | |
Customer didn’t abandon the conversation after being asked for their email, name, or phone number | |
Customer didn’t provide negative feedback in Request feedback or Article deflection interactions | |
Customer didn’t abandon the conversation without selecting an article during the Article deflection interaction | |
Assistant didn't transfer the conversation to an agent | |
Considered a KIQ Conversation? |
Scenario #3: Customer asks about the status of their order and receives an automated answer. The customer needs additional help, and the assistant transfers the conversation to an agent.
Customer didn’t create another conversation | |
Customer didn’t abandon the conversation after being asked for their email, name, or phone number | |
Customer didn’t provide negative feedback in Request feedback or Article deflection interactions | |
Customer didn’t abandon the conversation without selecting an article during the Article deflection interaction | |
Assistant didn’t transfer the conversation to an agent | |
Considered a KIQ Conversation? |
Scenario #4: Customer abandons the conversation when asked to input their email address.
Assistant didn’t transfer the conversation to an agent | |
Customer didn’t create another conversation | |
Customer didn’t abandon the conversation after being asked for their email, name, or phone number | |
Customer didn’t provide negative feedback in Request feedback or Article deflection interactions | |
Customer didn’t abandon the conversation without selecting an article during the Article deflection interaction | |
Considered a KIQ Conversation? |
Scenario #5: Customer abandons the conversation during an article search in chat.
Assistant didn’t transfer the conversation to an agent | |
Customer didn’t create another conversation | |
Customer didn’t abandon the conversation after being asked for their email, name, or phone number | |
Customer didn’t provide negative feedback in Request feedback or Article deflection interactions | |
Customer didn’t abandon the conversation without selecting an article during the Article deflection interaction | |
Considered a KIQ Conversation? |
Scenario #6: Customer abandons the conversation after doing an article search but doesn't select an article in chat. If they had selected an article to read, it would be considered a KIQ Conversation.
Assistant didn’t transfer the conversation to an agent | |
Customer didn’t create another conversation | |
Customer didn’t abandon the conversation after being asked for their email, name, or phone number | |
Customer didn’t provide negative feedback in Request feedback or Article deflection interactions | |
Customer didn’t abandon the conversation without selecting an article during the Article deflection interaction | |
Considered a KIQ Conversation? |
Scenario #7: Customer abandons in the middle of the conversation and then sends an email 3 hours after having abandoned the chat conversation.
Assistant didn’t transfer the conversation to an agent | |
Customer didn’t create another conversation | |
Customer didn’t abandon the conversation after being asked for their email, name, or phone number | |
Customer didn’t provide negative feedback in Request feedback or Article deflection interactions | |
Customer didn’t abandon the conversation without selecting an article during the Article deflection interaction | |
Considered a KIQ Conversation? |