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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.
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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.
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.
24 comments
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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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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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.
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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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
Raphaël Péguet - Officers.fr
Feedback: Si l'on indique dans un article "pour rajouter un contrat" et que le client tape dans la messagerie "je voudrais rajouter un contrat" ça ne suggère rien.
Par contre si dans la messagerie on tape "rajouter un contrat" ça marche.
Ce qui est un peu problématique
Taper "je voudrais" ne devrait même pas être pris en compte par le bot.
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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
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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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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Dane
I have created a ticket for you to investigate further. Please wait for my update via email.
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