Can an AI agent replace a support person?

For repeat questions, often yes. You still handle refunds, upset customers, and anything your help center doesn't cover.

Which help desks have a free plan?

Help Scout and Crisp both have free plans. Crisp's free plan has no AI credits, so its agent needs a paid plan.

Do I need a help desk if I use Chatbase?

No. Chatbase includes a basic inbox, so you can start without one. A help desk helps once conversations pile up.

How to run customer support with AI agents

Put every customer message in one help desk, write your common answers down once, and turn on the help desk's AI agent. Keep refunds, upset customers, and legal questions for yourself until you trust it.

What to hand to agents first

Start with the questions you answer the same way every week: how to reset a password, where an order is, how to cancel. An AI agent trained on your help center answers those on its own, at any hour. Keep refunds, upset customers, and anything legal for yourself until you trust what the agent does.

The three pieces

One inbox for every customer message. A help desk like Help Scout or Crisp collects email and chat in one place, so nothing gets lost in your personal inbox.
A help center the agent learns from. Write your answers down once. The agent is only as good as these pages.
An AI agent that answers. Most help desks now include one: Help Scout has an agent that resolves requests on its own, Crisp has Hugo, and Zendesk and Gorgias have their own. If you want a separate agent, Fin runs on Intercom or on top of other help desks, and Chatbase puts an agent on your site without a help desk underneath.

If customers call you, add an AI receptionist for the phone. The guide on AI receptionists covers how to pick one.

Set it up in five steps

Pick one help desk and forward your support email to it.
Write ten help center articles that answer your most common questions.
Turn on the AI agent for email and chat, and set it to hand off anything about refunds, billing disputes, or legal questions to you.
Read every answer it sends for the first two weeks. When an answer is wrong, fix the help center article behind it.
Once it's right almost every time, let it answer without your review, and check a sample each week.

What breaks

Confident wrong answers. The agent fills gaps in your help center with guesses. Tell it to say a person will confirm when it doesn't know, and keep the articles current.
Customers stuck in a loop. An agent that never lets go makes people angry. Make "talk to a person" always work, and answer those messages yourself, fast.
Actions you didn't mean to allow. Agents that can issue refunds or change accounts will do it. Start with answers only, and add actions one at a time.
Nobody reads the conversations. The same mistake repeats for weeks. Spend ten minutes a week reading what the agent sent.

Let your own agent work in your help desk

Some of these tools have an MCP server, so an agent like Claude can read and act in them for you. Crisp has an official one, and Fin connects through Intercom's. Look for the MCP label on each tool page.