AB Support Troubleshooting

Most AB Support snags come down to something not being connected yet. Here’s how to spot which, and the fix for each.

I sent a test email and no ticket appeared

No inquiry cards in the Teams channel

New inquiries should post an adaptive card to your channel. If they don’t:

• Make sure AB Support is installed in that channel (not just as a personal app), and the tab has been configured — see Installing AB Support.
• If it was working and stopped after a change, remove and re-add the app to the channel so the bot re-registers.
• A standalone desk has no channel, so it posts no cards at all — that is by design, not a fault. To connect one, @-mention the bot in the channel: @AB Support register. In a channel the mention is required — without it the bot never receives the message, so a bare register appears to do nothing. See the bot.

Email isn’t becoming tickets

• Confirm the support mailbox is connected and consented by an admin in support email — without that one-time consent, AB Support can’t read or send mail.
• Check Enable inbound email → tickets is ticked and saved — entering the mailbox alone isn’t enough.
• Check you’re pointing at a shared mailbox your team owns, spelled exactly right.

WhatsApp or SMS messages aren’t arriving

• Check Enable inbound WhatsApp & SMS → tickets is ticked and saved, and the number is the one assigned to this desk.
• Neither messaging channel is self-serve. WhatsApp needs a one-time Meta business verification, and a US number needs carrier registration — a toll-free number needs toll-free verification, a ten-digit local number needs A2P registration. Until the relevant one is done, messages won’t get through. Contact us and we’ll walk you through either; you don’t deal with the carriers or with Meta yourself.
• Both approvals take days, not minutes — so if you set the number up today, it not working today is expected rather than a fault.
• Formatting isn’t the problem — spaces and + are ignored, so the number matches however you typed it.

A reply to a customer didn’t get through

• Check the ticket’s activity timeline. Undelivered replies are logged there rather than failing silently — see how a ticket works.
• If it was an SMS to a US number, re-read the warning above — an unregistered number produces exactly this symptom.
• On WhatsApp, a reply sent outside the 24-hour window Meta allows won’t be delivered. Follow up on another channel.
• A customer who has opted out of messaging won’t receive anything on that channel.

Replies have stopped going out altogether

• AB Support’s Home tab warns you once either meter passes 80%, so this should rarely be a surprise.
• For the exact numbers, open the Tickets view — the two meters sit at the top of the queue. Home tells you that you are near the limit; the figures themselves are there.
• Customer transactions at zero stops replying for everyone, on every channel. AI credits at zero stops only the AI — your agents can still reply normally.
• Nothing has been lost. Customer messages keep arriving and keep becoming tickets the whole time.
• Adding a Usage Pack restores capacity immediately; otherwise it resets at the start of the month.
• The allowance is counted for your whole organization, so a busy second desk can use up what a quiet one was relying on.

The AI answers wrong or says “I don’t know”

• The AI only knows what’s in your knowledge sources. If it’s wrong or blank, add or fix the source article that should answer the question — remember the customer gets that answer directly, unreviewed.
• A brand-new desk with no sources configured will escalate nearly everything. That’s expected, not a fault.
• Check the article is written in the language the customer asked in. Retrieval matches words, so an English article will not answer a Japanese question — if you serve two languages, write the article in both.
• Rule out the allowance before you rewrite anything. If the AI stopped answering everything quite suddenly, that’s not a content problem — check whether the month’s AI credits have run out.
• Ask the AB Support bot the same question in Teams — it reads the same sources, so it tells you in one step whether the gap is in your knowledge base. Two caveats: the answer spends one AI credit, and if your credits are already gone the bot replies that it didn’t understand — which looks identical to a missing article. Check the meters first so you know which you’re looking at.
• Watch the helpfulness score — thumbs-down votes point straight at the gaps.

The web-chat bubble doesn’t appear on my site

• Check the embed snippet is on the page and its data-key matches the widget key in your web chat settings — a stale or mismatched key is the usual cause.
• If you regenerated the key, update the snippet everywhere it’s embedded — and anywhere your web form posts it, since they share one key.
• Use Preview widget in Settings to confirm the widget itself is healthy before hunting through your site’s code.

I signed in on the web but see no desks

• Access follows desk membership. On a channel-linked desk that means the people in its Teams channel who have opened AB Support; on a standalone desk it means whoever was invited. Signing in on the web doesn’t grant access by itself. See who can see your tickets.
• Make sure you signed in with the same Microsoft account you use in Teams.
• If no desk exists yet, make one: on the Home tab, type a name and click Create a desk. That works on the web just as it does in Teams. See support desks.

Nine times out of ten it’s a connection that hasn’t been made yet — walk Settings top to bottom and the gap usually stands out.