Smart suggestions allow your team to spend less time on questions that are answered in your Help Center, and more time on conversations better handled by people.
For customers who joined Intercom before May 3, 2023:
Smart suggestions are only available if you have a Help Center and will be turned on by default. They can be turned off from your Basics settings.
For customers who joined Intercom since May 3, 2023:
Smart suggestions aren't available on your workspace. Instead, you can enable Article Suggestions in your Messenger settings.
How smart suggestions work
First, if a customer asks a question in the Messenger, your bot will set their expectations by telling them how long it usually takes your team to respond. It will then instantly suggest relevant articles from your Help Center.
Smart suggestions will show up to 3 articles.
For example, If a customer asks ‘How do I invite a teammate?’, the bot will recognize that the question is relevant to the ‘how to add a teammate’ article or similar articles in the Help Center. The bot will then suggest those articles.
If the customer clicks on an article, the bot will ask them if they got what they needed.
If they click ‘Yes’, the bot will automatically close the conversation, so it never reaches your inbox.
If they say ‘No’, the bot will let them know your team’s usual reply time and ask them to stay to get more help.
For conversations started in your mobile app: the bot will suggest articles, but doesn't support following up to see if they were helpful or closing the conversation.
When do smart suggestions appear?
The bot only suggests articles at the right time, when it knows it can help. Here are some things to note about when a bot will start suggesting articles:
Smart suggestions won’t appear until you have 10 or more live articles in your Help Center, and your Help Center is turned on.
Smart suggestions won't appear if a Custom Answer has already participated in the conversation.
Articles need to be sorted into collections before they'll be suggested.
Your Help Center language must be set to English, and the user’s question must be asked in English.
Smart suggestions will not send if the user's message contains any of these words:
common profanity
cancel
trial
refund
dispute
subscription
billing
Questions need to be between 2 and 29 words after removing stop words (example: "a", "the", "is", etc.).
Keep improving smart suggestions
The bot keeps learning about your users’ questions as you add more articles to the Help Center. Writing relevant articles will ensure that smart suggestions answer more of your users’ questions over time.
Tips:
Review your user conversations to ensure you write relevant help articles.
Write plenty of short articles that address your users’ most common questions.
Use the words your users are searching for in your articles.
💡Tip
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