Investigator - hand hard questions to your own service

Some questions can’t be answered from documentation. “Why didn’t my customer get a reminder yesterday?” depends on that customer’s settings, their data, and sometimes your own code. Normally Cove hands questions like that to your team.

The Investigator adds a step before that. Cove hands the problem to a service you run (your investigator). The investigator looks into it and sends its findings back to Convot, and Cove replies to the customer from them. Investigations usually take a few minutes.

Unlike Connected data, the investigator isn’t a quick lookup Cove makes while it writes a reply. It works in the background, and Convot decides when to use it: only when Cove would otherwise hand the conversation to your team.

How a conversation goes

1. A customer asks something Cove can’t answer from your help center.
2. Convot sends the problem to your investigator, along with the customer’s verified shop and the conversation so far.
3. Cove tells the customer your team is looking into it and gives an estimated time, for example “within about 5 minutes”.
4. If the customer adds details in the meantime, Convot forwards them to the same investigation.
5. If the investigator can’t tell what the customer means, it asks them a short question instead of guessing. Cove sends the question as written, and the customer’s reply goes back to the investigator.
6. When the investigator reports back, its findings appear in the conversation as a private 🔎 note for your team.
7. Cove replies to the customer from the findings. If the findings say a person needs to act, the conversation goes to your team instead.

In Suggest mode, Cove drafts both the holding message and the reply as notes, and your team sends them.

When Cove uses the investigator

All of these must be true:

• Cove couldn’t answer the question from your help center.
• The customer’s identity is verified and includes their Shopify shop domain (see Identity verification).
• The question is about your product. Off-topic questions aren’t sent.
• The customer hasn’t asked for a person. “Can I talk to someone?” always goes straight to your team.

Ask it from Copilot

Your team can also use the investigator from Convot Copilot. Ask Copilot to investigate (“ask the investigator why her reminders aren’t sending”), or ask a question that needs a deeper look into the store’s data, and Copilot starts an investigation.

• The findings arrive a few minutes later as a private note in the conversation, and the teammate who asked gets notified.
• Nothing is sent to the customer, and Cove doesn’t reply from these findings.
• Replying to the customer while it runs doesn’t cancel it.

When something goes wrong

• The investigator flags it for a person, or fails: your team gets a note with the reason, and the conversation goes to them. In Auto mode, the customer is told a teammate will follow up.
• No reply in time: Convot waits the investigator’s estimated time plus 5 minutes, then hands the conversation to your team.
• A teammate replies first: the investigation is cancelled and Cove won’t reply. If findings arrive later, they’re saved as a note.

What the customer sees, and what they don’t

The investigator sends two kinds of findings:

• For the customer: a plain-language explanation and steps. Cove’s reply uses only these.
• Internal findings: technical notes for your team. These appear only in the private note and never reach the customer.

Set it up

The investigator is available on request. Contact Convot support to enable it for your organization, then:

1. Build your investigator service. Download the build instructions: the complete spec for your developer or an AI coding agent. It covers request signing, the investigate tool, the callback and the cancel endpoint, with code samples.
2. In Convot, open AI Agent, choose your app, and open Investigator.
3. Turn it on. Convot generates a signing secret.
4. Enter your investigator’s MCP URL.
5. Copy the signing secret and callback URL into your investigator’s configuration and restart it.
6. Click Test connection. Convot checks that it can reach your service and that the investigate tool is there.

Requirements for your investigator

• A public HTTPS URL. Convot never connects to private network addresses.
• It answers every call from Convot within 10 seconds. The investigation itself runs in the background.
• It verifies Convot’s signature on every request, and signs its callback with the same secret.
• It’s read-only: it never changes the customer’s data or settings.
• It only looks at the shop Convot sends, never at an account named in the customer’s message.

FAQ

Does the investigator see my customers’ messages? Yes. It receives the customer’s question and the conversation so far, so it knows what to look into. It doesn’t receive your private notes.

Can the investigator change anything in the customer’s account? It shouldn’t, and the build instructions require it to be read-only. Convot only ever asks it to investigate and report.

Does it cost extra? The investigation runs on your own service. Cove’s reply from the findings is billed like any other Cove reply. See Cost controls.