If you're using features such as AI agents that draw information from your help center content, focused, well-written, and well-formatted articles will lead to better results. You can optimize your articles to improve the quality and accuracy of automated responses that include generative replies and suggested articles.
This article contains the following topics:
About automated replies based on help center content
Some features can assess your help center content to send relevant, helpful responses to an end user’s request sent via email, web form, or messaging. These responses can be sent as:
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Links to suggested articles. A list of links for up to three specific articles. This type of reply is used in autoreplies with articles for web forms and emails.
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Generated responses. AI-created replies sent in response to an end user’s free-text entry in an AI agent conversation. This type of reply is used in generative replies in an AI agent.
Planning and organizing article content
The way you organize the content of a help center article impacts how effectively an AI agent can locate relevant information.
Creating titles for your articles
Article titles play a big part in determining whether an article is a good candidate for solving a customer's problem. If an article's title closely matches a customer’s text in an email or web form support request, or free-text comment in an AI agent, it's more likely to come up as a suggestion in the automated response.
Give your articles titles that are similar to how your customer might phrase their support request. Try formatting your article titles in one of the following ways:
- As a question : "How do I reset my password?"
- As a simple, active phrase: "Resetting a password"
Narrowing an article's focus
When possible, an article should cover a single, specific topic. How you implement this suggestion depends on how you present information in your articles:
- Issue/resolution articles: Articles that address specific issues and resolutions should focus on a very specific issue with a single resolution. For instance, rather than having a single article covering multiple related billing issues – payment options, requesting a refund, and challenging a charge – write three articles, one for each billing issue. Offer a single resolution for each issue to guide your customers to your preferred resolution, and link to other articles that may offer alternative resolutions.
- Process articles: The same principle applies to articles that describe processes and procedures. For example, when documenting an account set-up process that involves two distinct tasks (creating an account and selecting account options), consider presenting the information in two separate, concise articles, one for each task. This helps the AI agent identify the article that best matches a customer's specific request.
Writing article introductions
The first 75 words in an article are weighed more heavily than the rest of the content. By including as many related keywords and context as possible in an article's introduction, you will boost the accuracy of your suggested articles.
For example, if you're writing an article about your company's return policies, don't include a preamble about how you understand that sometimes a shirt is the wrong size or that everyone makes mistakes—this gets in the AI agent’s way when evaluating the article’s content. Start your articles cleanly and precisely ("We accept returns for a full refund within 30 days of purchase. After 30 days, you can request a store credit"), then get into the details.
Using article labels to filter results (autoreply with articles only)
Labels can restrict the articles are considered in an autoreply with
articles response. After you add a label to an article, you can include it in the autoreply with articles
trigger to filter the results.
There are a few approaches you can take when using labels.
Reducing the “noise” in your help center
Targeting customer segments
You can use article labels in triggers when you have different customer segments and you want to show each segment only the relevant articles. For example, suppose you are a mobile game developer and you support both Android and iOS platforms. When you get a request from a customer who's using Android, you want to suggest only Android-related articles.
To accomplish this, create an "Android" autoreply trigger with the condition based on your custom field "Platform = Android." Then, configure the trigger using labels to include only articles that contain the "android" label.
Repeat the process to set up a trigger for the iOS platform and label.
23 comments
Permanently deleted user
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Brett Bowser
Thanks for the heads up Rafael! I've updated the link to the correct article :)
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Permanently deleted user
This is helpful! I have a question which I think can best be explained by an example.
There are some things that our users cannot get an answer to in an article, no matter how hard we try. For example, if they've forgotten their username, no article can tell them what it is.
We have an article that gives them tips to remember what their username is, but let's say it doesn't help and they mark the article "unhelpful". How does Answer Bot interpret that?
It seems like if enough people mark it unhelpful, then AB is going to start thinking that's not a good article to serve to people who forgot their username...when in fact, it actually IS the best article.
Can we "reverse" those unhelpful marks, or is it even necessary?
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Plo Mangsat
Thank you for leaving a comment here. Currently, there's no way of deleting these votes. However, this is still possible, but by using Votes API.
First, you would have to find the ID of the Votes that you want to delete. One way to do this would be to use the List Votes endpoint to show the votes in a specific article. The result would be something like this:
The value property will show you the 'upvote' (1) or 'downvote' (-1). You can get the Vote ID from here and then use the Delete Vote endpoint.
The result after deleting the first vote:
There's also no direct consequence to having many unhelpful votes in an article. The votes are mainly used for reporting only.
You can also consider Disable "Was this article helpful?" in Zendesk Guide.
I hope this helps clear things.
Thanks!
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Permanently deleted user
Hi Plo Mangsat, thanks for the reply. I could use a little more guidance so I can decide how to proceed.
I do think that there is a consequence to having downvotes: it makes the article seem less helpful to end users when they see a lot of downvotes, as if we are not keeping our articles up to date. That is a serious consequence in terms of brand trust.
But before I disable it, I want to understand exactly how this works with Answer Bot.
It seems like the downvote (and upvote) count has been used a lot more since we started using Answer Bot. Is that just because people happen to be going to the articles more often, or is the up/downvote actually tied into the AB functionality?
For example, in a support ticket, I see that someone has been shown 3 articles by AB. The person clicked one of them "not helpful". Did that article get a "downvote" from this interaction?
Let's say that the person is shown 3 articles and one of them is the answer they need, so they click "Yes, solve my ticket" (or whatever it says). Now did that article get an upvote?
If AB and voting are interconnected, I need to know how disabling it will affect AB.
Thanks!
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Plo Mangsat
Article votes won't affect the functionality of your AB's article recommendation. Whenever a user upvotes or downvote an article, the article gets a vote for that interaction. I tested this as well that a user can only vote once in an article regardless of how many times they visited the article.
I hope this helps.
Thanks!
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Sanobar Khwaja
I have enabled answer recommendation but the bot fails to suggest any relative published article. Can anyone help?
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Cheeny Aban
We also suggest that you check Best practices: Helping Answer Bot find the right articles more easily to improve article recommendations
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Ola Timpson
Is there any way to add alternative text for Answer Bot to pick up? For example, we had a customer who didn't get our password reset article as a suggestion because her email said she needed a "pass word re-set". We don't want to write "pass word" in the article text, but would like it to get picked up for suggestions.
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Dane
Alternate text can only be used if you have embedded photos and videos in your articles. Once you have opened the article in Edit mode, click Source Code. You can modify the value in alt= to have the additional keywords your prefer.
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Rich Andersen
Hi,
Is there any difference between optimizing articles for the widget and optimizing to be recommended in support tickets or will optimizing articles for the widget also optimize them for recommended articles in a support ticket?
The reason for asking is because the widget is suggesting the right articles but when I send a support ticket with exactly the same phrase it suggests wrong articles.
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Dane
They serve the same purpose.
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Denise von femSense
Hi!
When you write about these 75 first words, which weigh more heavily, do these include the words from bullet lists?
For example, a client asked "Where can I buy your product? I live in Sweden". We have a help center article which lists all the countries in which our product is available (which includes Sweden and is in total less than 75 words). But the answer bot didn't suggest this article. Do you know why?
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Rich Andersen
Why does the widget suggest correct articles but the support ticket suggests totally incorrect articles when exactly the same phrase is used?
1
Dane
I have created a ticket for you to investigate further. Please wait for my update via email.
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Joel Selwood
How are you defining the Resolution Rate metric? Can that be added to the top of the article, as per the Suggestion Rate, please?
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Dave Dyson
Resolution rate is defined as "The percentage of enquiries resolved by Answer Bot from the total enquiries where it offered suggestions." -- see Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Answer Bot. But I'll see if I can get it mentioned here :)
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Jana Debusk
Hi,
Like Denise, I am also wondering about what is counted as the first 75 words. We like to include a "subtitle" (heading 4) at the top of the article, and then a table of contents (linking to other sections of our article) before we start in on the content. Will those be included in the first 75 words? If so, that should feed the answer bot more precise information, but if not we'll need to find a different solution. Thank you!
2
Marci Abraham
I'd like to get an answer to Jana's question too. We have a lot of articles that start with a TOC before the content. Ideally, there should be a tagging option to select which part of the article text is most important, not just the first X words. Wrapping the text in a tag such as <ab>...</ab> (via a button, for our less code-y article writers) would allow us to control the text that AnswerBot is using, and include important things like a bullet list as noted by someone above. But on the other hand, if a bullet list is not being counted, then maybe that's a good way to format our TOC so it gets ignored? Would love to get some clarity on this. Thanks!
1
Madison Hoffman
Hi Jana and Marci, the first 75 words of the article body are weighted regardless of any formatting or styling. So a TOC or summary can be a good thing, but keep in mind that the model is going to perform best with natural language so if you can phrase your TOC as questions, issue symptoms, or some other format that aligns with how your users ask about a topic, you'll see the best results.
Unfortunately, there's not a way for you to tell Answer Bot to ignore something in the first 75 words. We've run into this limitation at Zendesk ourselves - we used to include a disclaimer at the top of some articles acknowledging that translation was done by a machine, but this was confusing to Answer Bot. We have since experimented with including this disclaimer as an image instead, as well as just putting the disclaimer text at the bottom of the article.
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Doug Young
Is there a way to blacklist/block articles from showing up as recommended in autoreplies?
We post Release Notes in our Support Guide and they won't ever be a solution to anyone's problem.
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Arianne Batiles
Hi Doug Young,
Although we don't really have a native feature that can exclude articles from the recommendations.
You may use labels and add them to the articles you would only want to show. This way, the ones that don't have one will not be shown in the suggestions of Answer Bot. You may have a look at this article, which explains in detail how this works: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408883075098
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Naomi Greenall
Looking to enable the “Recommend articles” selection for my bot. How would this work into the current flows I have built out in bot builder? Will it suggest these first? I could just build a suggested articles step into my current flows but I'd rather use this feature.
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