If you're using features, such as autoreplies and conversation bots, 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 suggested articles and generative replies.
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 or emails, and as article recommendations in a conversation bot’s fallback response.
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Generated responses. AI-created replies sent in response to an end user’s free-text entry in a bot conversation. This type of reply is used in generative replies in a conversation bot.
Planning and organizing article content
The way you organize the content of a help center article impacts how effectively a bot 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 a conversation bot, 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 bot 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 bot’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.