Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Support Team or higher |
| Access | Admin |
Before shaping how an answer reads, settle what it may be built from. Which articles the agent can use is set under Knowledge sources, and the answer depends on who is asking: a signed-in customer can be answered from relevant restricted articles, while anybody not signed in gets public ones only.
Set the sources
- Select the AI agent in the AI agents workspace.
- Click Content in the sidebar and select Knowledge sources.
- Click Edit sources.
- At the top, choose Help center or External content.
- Select the source and click Save.
More sources is not better
An agent can use several knowledge sources, and Zendesk recommends keeping the number within reason, because too many can in some cases lead to reduced accuracy and increased latency. So adding a source is a trade, not a free improvement, and the question to ask is whether it answers something the existing ones do not.
Signed in changes the answer
Because restricted articles come into play for authenticated customers, the same question can get a fuller answer from a signed-in person than from a visitor. When a transcript looks thin: check whether that customer was signed in before you go looking at the article.
Keep the answer short
Two or three sentences, then a link. A long generated reply on messaging is skimmed, and skimming a procedure means missing a step.
Give people a way to check
A link to the source article answers the immediate question and lets somebody who needs the detail get it without asking again. It also gives the customer a way to verify, which matters more with a generated answer than with a written one.
Prefer an honest gap to a confident guess
When nothing suitable is found, the agent saying so and offering a person is a better outcome than an answer assembled anyway. That is where the worst transcripts come from, and it is worth testing deliberately.
Check it against a hard question
One that is only partly covered by an article. That is the case where these choices show their effect, and where a default configuration usually does the wrong thing.
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