A chatbot that only draws on a text file gets stuck at the first question about an actual order. Ours reaches for tools. If a visitor asks about the status of their order, the bot looks it up. If they ask about a product, the bot fetches the current details — with image, price and stock as they stand in your system at that moment.
A whole set of these tools is available, divided into groups: searching knowledge, recognising customers, reading documents, navigating your site, making contact, and passing a conversation to a fellow bot that specialises in something else. Per bot you switch on which tools it may use — a sales bot needs different tools than a service bot.
That handover deserves a separate mention. If a conversation gets stuck on a question outside the bot's field, it hands over to a specialist in the same team, together with the conversation history. The visitor sees who takes over and can decline. There is a limit on how many times such a conversation may jump, so a question does not go round in circles forever.
Whatever a bot is allowed to look up stays within your own environment. Every tool works on the data of your account and cannot reach anyone else's. Tools that make external requests are marked as such and can be managed separately.
Missing something? The set can be extended. A connection to your own system is a matter of adding one tool — the bot learns to work with it by itself, because with every question it sees what is at its disposal.