🤷‍♀️Why can't it answer?

What to do if your answers aren't correct or if your AI support agent isn't answering how you would expect.

My AI agent answers are mostly correct, there are just a few answers I'd like to update

In this situation, it is best to first try using the Custom answers feature to correct the issue.

My AI support agent isn't answering a question that I have added content for

Check you have uploaded the content required to answer the question

The first thing you should check is that the content piece (website, file, or page) has indeed been uploaded to your AI support agent by locating the specific piece in the Knowledge section, you would be surprised how often we investigate these issues and find the AI agent didn't have the knowledge to begin with!

Check the content itself will enable the AI to answer

Secondly, when you ask the question, check any of the links given in the response to the answer and see whether any of them have the information that would be required to answer the question:

  • If the relevant information isn't there this suggests that the AI was unable to find a relevant answer in your Knowledge, in this case, you could either: add a custom answer or try and improve the language of your documentation to make it more specific and detailed.

  • If the relevant information is there, first ask whether you would expect a person, given the question and the information would be able to answer, if not then it may be that your documentation can be improved, if yes then please share details of the question and answer with us via chat and we will investigate.

Ask yourself whether the question is something a user would likely need to ask

AI agents are optimized to answer questions based on knowledge uploaded, they are not "character avatars" for people to have long, personal conversations with, therefore they may not give friendly answers to questions about where they are from or what their name is.

Doing this would not only eat very quickly into your conversations, but would also create far more noise in your insights data, so our AI agents are designed to be "to the point" with questions and conversations.

Our experience also shows us that when most users interact on chat, their main focus is on a speedy answer to a question and so that is what they give.

AI agents can't answer every question

Our AI agents are designed to help you instantly answer customer support and internal knowledge-based questions from your customers and team.

They are not however designed for:

  • Document comparison - your AI support agent will not be able to compare 2 or more documents

  • Data analysis - Your AI support agent is unable to perform data analysis. This is due to the way the technology is set up and designed, it is made to answer questions using multiple (but a limited number of) pieces of context from a document instead of being able to aggregate, summarise or analyze and entire data set at once.

  • Setting up or scheduling appointments - your AI agent is unable to set up or schedule appointments for you in your calendar.

  • Maths - remember it is a language model first and foremost so we would always check its arithmetic if we were you and wouldn't recommend using it for maths.

  • Summarization - they will not be able to summarize documentation.

My answers were working fine before but now are not

We are always working on improving your AI agents, that may be through improving prompts, moving to the latest models, or making some infrastructural changes to improve speeds or answer quality.

This can mean that occasionally things that were answered previously are now not, this is incredibly rare and often a temporary issue.

We always strive to use the latest OpenAI models, as they are the most powerful and most actively developed, the sooner we can use them the longer we have to improve outcomes with them. In addition, OpenAI deprecates (removes) models over time - often within a few months of a newer model being released, so "sticking with the old" is rarely an option.

While some questions right now may not be being answered, there may also be far more that are now being answered that weren't before.

Answer quality is our utmost concern and priority and we monitor a range of statistics closely whenever we make changes (and before making these changes), and if it makes sense, we are not afraid to roll back changes where it is beneficial to the overall user base.

In short, if you feel answers are not performing as well as they were previously, it is likely something that will resolve itself within a few weeks and the overall path of answer quality and ability is forever improving to the extent that we don't believe this will even be a consideration in the very near future.

If you would like to track the changes we make, then you can see them here, in our algorithm change log.

I've tried everything and I still can't get the answers I want

If none of the above resolves your issue then please get in touch with us via chat.

Note that we will first ask if you have done all of the above steps before investigating your issue.

The more detail you can give us e.g.

  • Account email

  • Questions asked

  • Expected responses and

  • Website(s) or content uploaded

the quicker we will be able to assist with your request.

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