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Support content Best Practices for Fin
Support content Best Practices for Fin

How to produce support content that's optimized for Fin AI Agent and Fin AI Copilot.

Beth-Ann Sher avatar
Written by Beth-Ann Sher
Updated over a week ago

Fin AI Agent and Fin AI Copilot can consume all the support content in your Knowledge Hub to immediately offer your customers and teammates 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? Do teammates have the resources they need to help customers troubleshoot specific issues?

  • Reuse team macros - Go through your Support team’s macros/saved replies and decide if there are some that would make sense as a public article or snippet. Even if the content doesn’t seem substantial enough for its own article, Fin can still use an FAQ article or snippet for short pieces 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 public articles in Intercom, 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 agents 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 Fin (and humans!) 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 content in a more streamlined way not only helps humans, but AI too. Use rich formatting such as headings, tables, and bullet points to make it easier for Fin to scan and retrieve the answer your customer or teammate 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 piece of content includes a clear reference to the type of user the content is geared towards. Tip: Use audience rules to target content at specific customer segments with Fin AI Agent.

  • Auditing for accuracy: From sales and engineering, to legal and security - knowledge can be created by multiple teams and subject matter experts (SMEs). So divide your content by owner and ask each team or SME to review their knowledge 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:

  • Sort your content by ‘Last updated’ to find the content 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 content to reflect minor aesthetic edits to your product or internal workflows is less urgent than updating with more major functional or usability changes to your product or service offering.


Examples of Best Practice

The following Best Practices use public articles as an example, however they can be applied to all content in the Knowledge Hub which is enabled for Fin (including internal articles, snippets, and synced or external sources).

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 (H1, H2, or H3) to make your content scannable for both Fin and humans. But you should also include some of the header information in the paragraph below it, just in case Fin fails to properly capture all the headings in the HTML.

Good practice

Check out as a guest

To 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 user

To 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 long, detailed paragraphs are formatted using clear bulleted lists instead.

Good practice

Use Projects to:

  • Create and manage tasks in one place.

  • Get a clear overview of timelines and stay on track.

  • Collaborate efficiently with your whole team.

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. If you do want Fin to handle questions which may involve some math, it's helpful to include examples which clearly showing how the sum can be calculated.

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 or snippets

Fin drives the most value 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 in one public / internal article or create snippets. 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 resolutions.

When setting up FAQ articles it is strongly recommended to use headers (H1, H2, H3) when structuring your FAQs.

Give context to multimedia

Fin, and other AI bots, can't use images and videos to provide answers (yet!) So if you have included multimedia in your support content, 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:

  1. From your dashboard, navigate to your projects page and click the plus icon (+) in the top left of your toolbar.

  2. Add a project name. Make sure it's clear and explains what the project is about at a glance.

  3. Success! Your project will now be visible on your "My Projects" page.

Poor practice


💡Tip

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