Core concepts
The seven ideas that make up Vivollo. Learn these once and the whole platform falls into place.
Every product has its own vocabulary, and the fastest way to feel at home in Vivollo is to learn a handful of words. There aren't many — really just seven — and they fit together in a way that's easy to picture.
Here's the mental model in one sentence: a customer reaches you on a channel, an assistant runs a flow made of actions, drawing on collections for knowledge, kept in line by guardrails, all visible to you in conversations and summarized in insights.
Let's meet each one.
Channels — where conversations happen
A channel is any place a customer can talk to you: WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, your website widget, or a help desk like Connexease. You connect a channel once, and from then on its messages flow into Vivollo.
The important part: no matter how many channels you connect, there's still one agent and one customer history behind them. Someone who messages on Instagram and later on WhatsApp is the same person to Vivollo.
→ Channels
Collections — what the agent knows
A collection is the agent's knowledge — its memory of facts. Your FAQs, your return policy, your product catalog, your venue listings: each lives in a collection built from a template that fits its shape.
When a customer asks something, the agent searches the relevant collection and answers from your real content — not from guesswork. This is what keeps answers accurate and grounded in your truth.
Assistants — the agent's personality and brain
An assistant is the configurable "mind" that does the talking. It defines the agent's persona (its instructions and tone), which AI model it uses, and what knowledge and tools it can reach.
You might have one assistant for friendly pre-sales chat and another for careful order support. Each can think at a different level — from a fast, economical model to your smartest, most capable one — depending on the job.
Flows — the conversation's game plan
A flow is what happens, step by step, when a customer starts talking. You build it visually on a canvas — no code — by connecting blocks.
A flow can be as simple as "hand everything to the AI" or as detailed as "greet them, ask what they need, route refunds one way and product questions another." You're always in control of the path.
→ Flows
Actions — the building blocks of a flow
If a flow is a recipe, actions are the steps. Each action does one thing: send a message, capture an email, ask the AI, search your knowledge, call an external API, hand off to a human.
You drag actions onto the canvas and connect them. There are around two dozen, and you'll only ever need a few at a time. Each one is documented in the Actions reference.
The most powerful action is Agentic AI — a single block that turns the conversation over to an autonomous agent which can search, remember, look up orders, and hand off on its own. Many great agents are mostly just this one block.
Guardrails — keeping the AI safe and on-brand
A guardrail is a rule that checks messages before they're sent or acted on. Guardrails keep the agent on-topic, strip out sensitive data like card numbers or ID numbers, and stop it from saying things it shouldn't.
They run on the way in (what the customer sends) and on the way out (what the agent replies), so you can trust the AI with real customer conversations.
Conversations & Insights — seeing and improving
Everything above produces conversations — the live and past chats you and your team can read, join, take over, and resolve in the inbox.
And every conversation quietly teaches you something. Insights reads them all and tells you why customers reach out, what's trending, and where the agent is getting stuck — even turning those blind spots into new knowledge articles.
How it all fits together
Picture a single customer message arriving:
- It comes in on a channel.
- A flow picks it up and an assistant takes over.
- The assistant runs actions — searching collections, remembering details, maybe looking up an order.
- Guardrails check every reply before it leaves.
- The whole exchange shows up in conversations, and insights learns from it.
That's Vivollo. Seven words, one loop. Once this clicks, the rest of the docs are just the details of each piece.
Ready to look around? Let's take a quick tour of the panel.