One topic per article
An article covering returns, complaints and exchanges at once will be retrieved for all three questions and serve none of them well.
Documentation
Running the knowledge base
The editorial cycle, import from a URL, and the rules that decide what the agent may cite. Practice rather than retrieval theory.
An article's life cycle
The agent sees only the published state. That is the simplest way to keep a working note from becoming an answer to a customer.
| State | Who usually does it | Visible to the agent |
|---|---|---|
| Draft | The person writing the content | No |
| Reviewed | A second person on the team | No |
| Published | Someone with publishing rights | Yes |
| Archived | Someone withdrawing outdated content | No |
Import from a URL
- What you can give
- The address of a page with textual content. Supported types are a web page, plain text and markdown text.
- One page, not a whole site
- The import fetches the address you give. It does not follow links and does not crawl a site.
- Guard against internal addresses
- The import checks the address scheme, every network address and every redirect, and counts size while downloading. It also passes no authentication headers, so it cannot reach behind your login.
- What happens next
- Imported content arrives as a draft and goes through the same editorial cycle as a hand written article.
How to write so the agent finds it
The customer's words, not only yours
If customers say parcel and you say shipment, both words are worth having in the text.
Conditions stated plainly
A deadline, an exception and a threshold written out can be quoted. A general sentence cannot.
Dates and validity
Content that applies from a given date should say so, otherwise versioning answers what the agent knew but not since when.
The gap register as a backlog
Questions without coverage land in the gap register. It is the best source of further articles, because it comes from real conversations rather than from guesses about what customers might ask.
Start with five articles
The five most frequent questions are enough to see how the agent behaves on your content and where it sends a case to a human by itself.