Fin can consume all the information in your Help Center, or any public URL within minutes to immediately offer your customers accurate and trustworthy answers.
Here’s how you ensure your content is optimized for AI support, both around creating new support content, and optimizing existing content.
Create new content to fill gaps
Spot trends - Look at patterns among your customer conversations that an article might address. What questions are customers always asking? Is that material available in your Help Center for customers to self-serve?
Reuse team macros - Go through your Support team’s macros/saved replies and decide if there are some that would make sense as an article. Even if the content doesn’t seem substantial enough for its own article, AI can still use an FAQ article for short snippets of information that have no other obvious home.
Analyze performance - Look at reports on your existing support content to see which articles need to be optimized. For Help Center articles, you can use the Articles report to filter by articles which received the most negative reactions, or started the most conversations over a selected time period, and preview these conversations to see why customers still required human support after viewing them.
Pro tip: Add an article with all the details your customers might need to get in touch with your team. While it might seem counter-intuitive, our user testing shows if customers know they can get help from an actual support rep when they need it – via email, live chat, social platforms, etc. – they’re more willing to look for an answer on their own first.
This approach reduces conversation volume for support reps so they have the time to provide valuable human support for high-value and complex queries, like billing queries and emotionally-charged complaints.
Optimize and update existing content
The more simple, straightforward, and comprehensive your articles are, the easier it will be for AI bots like Fin (and your customers) to consume them. If it’s confusing for a human to read, it’ll be confusing for Fin as well. Focus on:
Simplifying language: Think about how your users frame questions and ensure that the answer is phrased in a relevant and accessible way. Avoid basic “yes” or “no” answers; instead, use full sentences to disambiguate the answer for Fin.
Creating a scannable structure: Structuring your help articles in a more streamlined way not only helps humans, but AI too. Use headings, tables, and bullet points to make it easier for AI bots like Fin to find and provide the answer your customer is looking for.
Identifying who the content is aimed at: If you have a variety of user types, and your support content differs for each one, ensure that each article includes a clear reference to the type of user the content is geared towards. Tip: Use audience rules in Intercom Articles to target customer segments with specific content. Fin will respect these audience rules during conversations with customers.
Auditing for accuracy: Ask your Product team and Engineers to fact check information relating to their product area.
Explaining key terms: Explain the meaning of special terms or spell out acronyms the first time you use them, even if you think your audience already knows what they mean.
Prioritize the most important updates
Here are some tips to help you decide what to address first:
Filter your articles by ‘Last updated’ to find those most likely to contain outdated information.
Identify the high-traffic articles in your Help Center (based on metrics like views and conversations started from articles), and make them as straightforward and informative as you can.
Not all inaccuracies in your support content are created equal. Updating articles to reflect minor aesthetic edits to your product is less urgent than updating with more major functional or usability changes to your product or service.
Use the Fin answer debugger
The Fin answer debugger has been designed specifically to help you understand how Fin generated an AI answer using your support content. It's great for identifying which content was used by Fin or may need creating or updating based on the response Fin was able to give the customer.
The answer debugger is available on each AI-generated answer via the Help Desk, allowing you to improve how Fin handles support queries in the future by:
Creating new content, or
Updating existing content.
Examples of Best Practice
Avoid ambiguity
If it’s confusing or ambiguous for a human to read, it’s also going to be ambiguous for Fin! (And that’s when there’s a chance it’ll give the wrong answer, or make an incorrect inference, or just not answer something that otherwise should be answerable).
Good practice | Collaborating on projects is easier when you invite teammates to join your team. |
Poor practice | It’s easier when you invite teammates. |
Restate questions
You don’t need to do a question-answer pair, but write as if you’re doing a radio interview and you don’t want to be quoted out of context.
Good practice | You can use your own packaging when sending an item back for a return or exchange, no need to save the original shipping box. |
Poor practice | Do I need to use the original outer shipping box to ship back a return item? No. |
Use headers
It’s important to use headers to make your content scannable for both Fin and customers. But you should also include some of the header information in the paragraph below it, just in case the Fin content importer fails to properly capture all the headings in the HTML.
Good practice | Check out as a guestTo check out as a guest, click ‘Checkout as guest’ and enter your email address. We’ll need this to confirm your order and update you on shipping.
Check out as a logged in userTo check out as a logged in user, sign in or create a new account by clicking ‘Sign in’ at checkout. This lets you collect points and keep all your orders in one place. |
Poor practice | Checking out can be done as a guest or logged in user. Click ‘Checkout as guest’ and enter your email address. We’ll need this to confirm your order and update you on shipping. You can also sign in or create a new account by clicking ‘Sign in’ at checkout. |
Use bulleted lists
Fin performs better when support content is formatted using clear bulleted lists.
Good practice | Use Projects to:
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Poor practice | You can do lots of things with Projects, like creating and managing tasks, getting an overview of timelines to stay on track, and collaborating efficiently with your whole team. |
Don’t ask Fin to do math
For example, if you have a complicated returns process with many moving parts, you should explain each moving part carefully.
Good practice | Returns can take up to 12 business days to post to your account. This is because the shipment may take up to 7 days to arrive at our warehouse, and 5 additional days to be processed. If you don’t see the return status updated in your account and it’s been more than 12 business days, please ask to speak to a human. If your return has been posted to your account but you’re waiting for your refund to appear on your payment method, please know it could take up to 5 additional business days for it to appear. |
Poor practice | Refunds for returns can take 7 days for the shipment to arrive, and then 5 days to process the refund, and 5 more days for the refund to be credited to your account. |
Include contact details
If certain numbers/addresses are specific to a particular situation, just clearly delineate them.
Good practice | Contact Sales team: 018 4366891 Contact Support team: 018 4366892 Advertise with us: 018 4366893 |
Poor practice | Contact us Sales: 018 4366891 Support: 018 4366892 Advertising: 018 4366893 |
Use FAQ articles
Fin drives the most value for customers when it resolves high volume, repetitive questions. So if you have small pieces of information that don’t require a full article or have no other obvious home, you should include them as a list of FAQs. Fin will still be able to find them and serve them to customers.
Good practice | Can I have a free trial? Yes, all new customers get a 1 month free trial after signing up.
Do I need to upload a profile picture for my pet? No, you don’t need to upload a profile picture for your pets, but we’d love to see them! |
Poor practice | Excluding this information from your support content and missing out on some easy deflections. |
Give context to multimedia
Fin, and other AI chatbots, can't use images and videos to provide answers (yet!) So if you have included multimedia in your articles, it's important to also include step-by-step text instructions above or below any image or video which guides the user through the process.
Bonus: this makes your content more accessible to visually impaired users while also catering for multi-mode learners.
Good practice |  To create new projects, just follow these steps:
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Poor practice |
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💡Tip
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