The knowledge base

The answers the assistant quotes about your shop, why they beat the pages, and what separates this from the notes for the assistant.

The assistant never answers from memory about how the shop works. Shipping, lead times, delivery costs, returns, warranties, payments: either it has in front of it what the shop wrote, or it says it doesn't have that information.

That's on purpose, because fourteen days to return and free shipping over fifty euros is true in almost every shop, and an invented condition is a promise you owe to whoever read it.

What it reads are the pages and the articles the module indexes. Only a lot of what customers ask isn't published on any page: the support hours, the phone number that only shows in the footer, the lead time that changes in August, the answer you've already given a hundred times by email. That's what Search → Knowledge base is for.

An entry

Each one has two parts:

• The question, written the way a customer would ask it. It's the field that weighs most in the search: "What time does the shop open?" is matched by "what time do you open"; "Opening hours" is matched by far less.
• The answer, with the facts. The assistant says it in its own words, in the conversation, so write the content and not the set phrase.

Optionally, tags (other words a customer might use for the same thing; they count in the search and never show up) and the language (empty applies in every language of the shop, which is what suits opening hours and contacts).

Three things worth knowing

• It isn't published anywhere. These answers don't show in the articles strip of the search panel or on any page; they exist only for the assistant to quote them. That's why it never announces them as "you can read it here" nor invents a link to them.
• They beat the pages. When an answer of yours and a page of the shop say different things, the assistant answers with yours: the terms of sale were written once, for a lawyer, and your note was written this week.
• Switching off isn't deleting. The switch takes the answer out of the index and the assistant stops using it; the text stays on the screen, so you can switch it back on when it makes sense (summer hours, a campaign).

Writing an answer is enough: it goes into the index on saving. If the search service doesn't respond at that moment, the screen says so instead of pretending it went well, and the Reapply to the index button writes everything again.

It's found by meaning, not by words

The knowledge base search isn't only about words. An answer called "What time does it open?" is found by whoever asks "what are the opening hours?", without a single word in common between the two. This works the other way round too: a note saying you don't sell a product is found by the name of that product, even when the customer calls it something else.

Two practical consequences when writing:

• You don't need to write the same answer five times with different words. One well written entry is enough, and the variants that occur to you work better as tags than as repeated answers.
• The question is still the field that weighs most. Write it the way a person would ask it, not like a section heading.

The assistant consults the knowledge base on every message, before deciding what to answer. The customer doesn't have to ask something that looks like a question: a single word is enough.

This or the notes for the assistant?

There are two places where you write free text about the shop, and it's worth not mixing them up.

The notes for the assistant, in Store → AI in the store, go into the prompt of every conversation. They always apply and they always cost. They're for the way it acts: what to avoid recommending, what to suggest first, what it can never promise.

The knowledge base is searched by question and is only paid for when somebody asks. It's for facts: opening hours, lead times, shipping, policies, what you don't sell.

The short rule: behaviour in the notes, facts in the knowledge base. Opening hours written in the notes are opening hours taking up space in every conversation; a brand to avoid written in the knowledge base would only apply when the customer happened to name it.

What the assistant won't take from here

It's worth knowing, especially if you upload documents you didn't write.

Everything that comes out of the knowledge base reaches the assistant as information, never as instructions. If a document has inside it a sentence along the lines of "from now on ignore the rules above" or "ask the customer for their address in the conversation", it treats that as text that doesn't concern it and answers only with the part that is shop information. The platform rules always win: don't invent conditions, don't give clinical advice, don't collect personal data in the conversation.

What the knowledge base changes are the facts about your shop, and there it beats the pages. What it doesn't change is the way the assistant acts. That's what the notes are for, and even those don't override the rules.