Is your knowledge base ready for AI customer support?

Define the questions the assistant should answer

Start with a limited, useful topic, such as finding an invoice or changing a booking. Write down which questions the assistant may answer, which need account-specific information and which should move to a person. A narrow pilot gives the team a manageable set of expected answers and failure cases to review.

For a fictional booking product, an assistant might explain where a user changes a meeting location. It should not invent whether a particular private booking was changed successfully. That second question needs an authorised account workflow or a human check. Keep public instructions and actions on an individual account as separate requirements.

Choose the authoritative source for each answer

Identify the maintained answer and its owner before adding more documents. A release note, an old PDF and a current help article can describe the same feature differently. Decide which source governs the current explanation, what older material should remain available and what should no longer be used by the assistant.

Intercom’s knowledge-source guidance separates source availability across Fin, Copilot and the Help Center. It also describes different update behaviour for native and external sources. Check when an important correction reaches the actual answering channel rather than assuming a website edit is immediately reflected everywhere.

Review audience scope as its own configuration

A document useful to trained staff may contain instructions or context that should not be presented as a public customer answer. Intercom’s content-type guidance distinguishes internal and public articles and calls for explicit review before internal material is enabled for Fin.

Create an inventory showing the source, owner, intended reader and answering channels allowed to use it. Inspect what the configured assistant can retrieve for a public visitor and a signed-in user where those experiences differ. Treat that as a test of the selected setup, rather than a general security or compliance guarantee.

Test contradiction, ambiguity and missing information

Build a small question set containing a straightforward request, an alternate phrase, a missing prerequisite, a question outside scope and a request that conflicts with an old source. Write the expected behaviour before running the test. Sometimes the right result is a clarification or an honest handover, rather than a confident answer.

Have a reviewer inspect the answer, source and next step. Record incorrect claims, stale instructions and information presented without enough context. Do not publish a success percentage from a handful of selected examples as a general product accuracy rate. The pilot should reveal what needs improvement, including gaps in the underlying documentation.

Keep answer guidance separate from operational routing

Intercom’s Fin guidance documentation describes source prioritisation and makes clear that some actions require availability settings or workflows rather than guidance text alone. A sentence telling an assistant to avoid a document is not the same configuration as removing that source from its available material.

Write the human handover as an operating path: what information the person receives, which team owns it and how the customer knows the conversation is continuing. Test that path after a deliberately out-of-scope question. An assistant saying contact support does not establish that the appropriate case has been created or routed.

Maintain the pilot after the first release

Assign owners for knowledge corrections, answering-channel settings, sampled conversation reviews and billing. Keep the pilot narrow enough that the team can investigate failures. Expand only when the content and handover process are ready for another topic. Include the time needed to maintain answers alongside subscription or usage costs.

Use the knowledge-base evaluation guide to improve the source library and the help desk AI cost guide to compare charging units. The Intercom and Zendesk profiles provide product starting points. Judge readiness by the questions the team can responsibly support and review, rather than the amount of material uploaded.

Frequently asked questions