Show buttons and quick replies

What it is

Button is the simplest Call Action type. You configure a label and a link; the chatbot decides when in a conversation that link is worth offering, and the button appears underneath its reply for the visitor to click.

It is the only action type that makes no outbound call, sends no email, and stores no secret. That makes it both the safest thing to turn on first and the best way to prove the whole Call Actions pipeline works on your chatbot before you wire up anything that costs money.

In the editor and the type picker it is labelled Button — "Show a call-to-action button in the chat."

When you would use it

• Booking: a "Book a demo" button pointing at your scheduling page, shown when the visitor asks about a demo.
• Checkout or pricing: "See pricing" when the conversation turns commercial.
• Downloads: a spec sheet, a menu PDF, a price list.
• Account actions you do not want a chatbot doing: "Open your dashboard", "Manage your subscription" — hand the visitor a link instead of building an API integration.
• Directions or contact: a map link, a WhatsApp link, a phone link.

Use a button when the useful outcome is the visitor lands on a page you already have. Use Custom API when the chatbot needs to actually do something on your systems, and Collect visitor details when you want the information to come back to you instead.

Where to find it

Open Dashboard → Chatbots → your chatbot → Actions, select New action, and pick Button under Start from scratch.

Steps

1. Open the Actions tab and select New action.
2. Choose Button.
3. On the Details tab, set a Name for your own reference, such as Book a demo.
4. Fill When should the AI use this? — for example, "When the visitor asks to see the product, book a demo, or talk to sales about a specific plan."
5. On the Configure tab, set the Button label the visitor will read. Keep it short — up to 80 characters, and it looks best at three or four words.
6. Set the Button URL. It must be a full http:// or https:// address; a bare example.com is rejected.
7. Leave Open in a new tab on unless you specifically want the visitor to leave the page they are chatting on.
8. Save, then use the Test tab with a sample visitor message to confirm the chatbot would offer it.
9. Turn on Enabled and save.

What you will see

Under the chatbot's reply, the visitor gets a pill-shaped button in your chatbot's accent colour, with the label you set. It works the same way in the website widget, on the hosted chatbot page, and in the test chat, so what you see while testing is what a visitor gets.

Two details worth knowing:

• The button colour follows your chatbot's accent, and the text colour is chosen automatically so it stays readable on light and dark accents. You do not style it yourself. See Chatbot appearance.
• Links are sanitised before they render. Only ordinary web links survive; anything using an unusual scheme is dropped rather than shown. This protects visitors even if a link ever reached the chat from somewhere other than your own configuration.

The chatbot also mentions the button in its prose ("you can book a time here"), so the reply still reads naturally to someone using a screen reader or a channel that cannot render buttons.

Writing a label and description that work

The label is what the visitor reads; the description is what the model reads. They do different jobs.

Field	Written for	Good	Bad
Button label	The visitor	Book a 20-min demo	Click here
When should the AI use this?	The AI model	When the visitor asks to see the product live, or asks for a demo, trial, or walkthrough.	Booking

Two or three sharp, distinct buttons beat ten overlapping ones. If two buttons have descriptions that could both match the same question, the chatbot will pick between them inconsistently — merge them or make each description name a clearly different situation.

Buttons versus suggested messages

If what you actually want is a row of clickable questions visitors can tap before they type anything, that is a different feature: Suggested messages (Settings → Suggested messages). A suggested message sends its text into the chat as if the visitor had typed it; a Button action opens a link. See Suggested messages.

Several small Button actions can still act as a link bar later in the conversation. Create one action per destination — See pricing, Book a demo, Read the docs — each with a tightly-scoped description. The chatbot may offer more than one in a single reply when more than one genuinely fits, and they render side by side under the bubble.

Two caveats:

• Every enabled button counts against your plan's Call Action allowance, so a six-button link bar costs six of your slots. Suggested messages do not count against it.
• Buttons are links out. They cannot send a message back into the chat on the visitor's behalf. The buttons that do talk back to the chatbot are the suggested-message chips, the clickable reply options the chatbot offers when a reply ends in a short list of choices (on by default — see Chatbot AI settings), and the automatic Confirm / Cancel pair that appears for actions that require confirmation — see Create a Call Action.

Limits and plan notes

• The label is capped at 80 characters and the URL at 2048.
• Only http and https links are accepted.
• A button counts as one enabled Call Action: Free 0, Starter 3, Standard 8, Pro 12, Agency 20 per chatbot. See Plans and what you get.
• You need permission to manage actions on that chatbot. See Roles and permissions.
• Requires confirmation exists on this type too, but a link is not destructive, so leave it off. Turning it on makes the visitor click Confirm before they can even see the button, which is worse for everyone.
• Buttons are not tracked as clicks by Agentency. If you need click-through numbers, add your own campaign parameters to the URL and read them in your analytics tool.

Common problems

The button never appears.

Work through it in this order: the action is Enabled; the chatbot is active (a paused or draft chatbot answers nothing on public surfaces — see Activate or pause a chatbot); and the description matches how visitors actually phrase the question. The Test tab tells you which of the three it is in one run.

Saving fails with "Enter a valid http(s) URL".

The URL field needs the scheme. Use https://example.com/demo, not example.com/demo or www.example.com/demo.

The button shows for the wrong questions.

The description is too broad, or it overlaps another action's description. Narrow it and name the situations it should not cover.

The button appeared but the link is dead.

Agentency does not check that your URL still resolves — it only checks that the address is well formed. Open the link yourself after any site migration or page rename.

It works in the test chat but not on my website.

The widget is loading a different chatbot, the chatbot is not active, or the page it is embedded on is not in the allowed domains list. See Widget not showing.