Knowledge is what the agent is allowed to know. Everything it says should trace back to something here, and an answer that cannot be traced is an answer waiting to be wrong.
Three ways in, in ascending order of value
Section titled “Three ways in, in ascending order of value”Crawl your site. Fastest. Gets a working agent today. It captures what you have already published, which is a lot, and it captures it in marketing voice, which is not always what a question needs.
Upload documents. Good for the things that exist as files: policies, price lists, manuals.
Author answers. Slowest, and the one that actually makes an agent good. Every business has questions its website has never answered plainly. Delivery on public holidays. What happens if the size is wrong. Whether you take that one payment method everyone asks about.
A dozen authored answers usually outperform a thousand crawled pages, because they are the dozen people ask.
Keeping it honest
Section titled “Keeping it honest”Knowledge goes stale quietly. Nobody files a ticket saying “your agent is citing last year’s returns policy”, they just get a wrong answer and leave.
Two habits prevent most of it:
- Re-crawl when the site changes, not on a calendar.
- When a human corrects the agent in the inbox, write that correction into knowledge. Otherwise you will correct it again next week.
The second one is the whole game. An inbox is a list of things your agent did not know, delivered free, sorted by how often people ask.
Sources
Section titled “Sources”An answer can carry its sources, and the widget will show them. Citations cost a line and buy trust, and they let a customer check the thing themselves rather than escalating to ask whether the agent was right.
When an answer must be exact
Section titled “When an answer must be exact”Some answers cannot be paraphrased: a legal line, a refund policy, a regulated disclosure. Those belong in saved responses, which return the text you wrote, word for word, rather than the model’s summary of it.