Gives the chat drawer a branded Home screen, so a guest opening the Concierge for the first time sees a warm welcome, their most useful next step, and a way in for the homes you don’t publicly list, instead of a blank chat box.
What it does #
By default the Concierge opens straight into an empty chat transcript, which asks a guest to know what to type before they have even gotten their bearings. Turning on the tabbed widget shell adds a Home tab alongside Chat (and, on sites running Conversion Kit’s Availability Watchers, a Waitlist tab), so the chat drawer opens on a screen built to orient a guest first.
The Home tab includes:
- A branded header with your site name and a quick-search box that hands a typed question straight to the concierge.
- A resume card that reappears once a guest has already chatted in this session, showing their last question and the concierge’s last answer under “Pick up where we left off,” so returning to the tab does not lose the thread.
- A Guests often ask section listing your Popular Questions as tappable chips (see below for where those come from).
- A Beyond the listings block inviting guests to describe a home you have not published, with an “Ask the concierge” button and, if you have a support phone number configured, a tap-to-call link next to it.
If a site running Conversion Kit’s Availability Watchers is present, guests who have set up date watches in the current chat session also get a Waitlist tab, listing what they are watching for with live status pills (Active, Pending, Paused) and, where the connected watcher service supports it, an on/off switch to pause or resume each one without leaving the chat.
How to turn it on #
1. Enable the tabbed widget shell #
In AI Concierge settings, open the Chatbot tab and switch on Tabbed Widget Shell. It is off by default, so the widget keeps its current single-pane chat until you opt in.
2. Choose where Popular Questions come from #
Still on the Chatbot tab, set Popular Questions Source to Curated, Self-tuning, or Hybrid (see Settings below), and fill in any curated questions you want guaranteed to appear.
3. Review the self-tuning set, if used #
If you turn on Self-tuning or Hybrid, use Preview next tuned set to see what the nightly job would serve without saving anything, and reject any question you do not want surfaced (see Settings below).
Settings #
| Setting | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Tabbed Widget Shell | Adds the Home / Chat (and, where available, Waitlist) tab bar to the chat drawer. The Chat experience itself is unchanged. Off by default. |
| Popular Questions Source | Where the Home tab’s “Guests often ask” questions come from. Curated (the default) shows only the questions you enter below. Self-tuning mines your site’s own answered chats nightly for the questions guests actually ask and the concierge answers well, with a safety pass that blocks anything containing personal information or property names before it can appear; if a nightly run fails or produces nothing safe, the previous set keeps serving rather than falling back silently. Hybrid shows your curated questions first and fills any remaining slots with the mined ones. |
| Curated Popular Questions | One question per line, up to 6 entered and the first 4 shown. Used alone in Curated mode, and as the guaranteed opening slots in Hybrid mode. Leave blank in Curated mode to fall back to the widget’s generated suggestion chips instead. |
| Self-tuning Preview | A “Preview next tuned set” button that runs the mining and scoring pass on demand, without saving or changing what guests see, so you can check the results before switching sourcing to Self-tuning or Hybrid. Each question in the preview (and in the currently live tuned set) has a Reject button; rejecting adds it to a per-site blocklist shown underneath, with an Unblock button to reverse it. A blocked question is never mined, generated, or served again until unblocked. |
Tips #
- Blank Home tab sections stay hidden rather than showing empty: a first-time guest with no chat history simply will not see the resume card, and a site with no Popular Questions configured yet will not show that section either.
- If a site’s connected watcher service is missing or too old to manage watches in-chat, the Waitlist tab still appears but tells the guest the email links from their watch confirmation always work instead, so nothing looks broken.
- Self-tuning needs a real volume of answered chats to produce anything; a quiet site simply keeps serving curated or default questions until enough traffic accumulates.
- Reject a mined question as soon as you see one you would not want repeated. It comes out of both the live set and the nightly job immediately, and you can always undo it from the Blocked list.
- See AI Concierge: Ask Bar for a second, page-embeddable entry point into the same concierge, and AI Concierge: Operator Tools for the full settings map.