Your institute revises its fees on the first of April. The accounts team updates the website and tells the counsellors. Nobody tells the agent, because nobody thinks of it as a person who needs telling. On the third of April it reads last year's figure to a parent, with total confidence.
We wrote earlier about why an agent should answer from your own documents. This post covers what happens six months later, once the documents have started to age.
What the agent actually does with your documents
During a call, for each question, the agent reads the few best-matching passages from the knowledge base linked to it. It doesn't read the whole file. You can change how many passages it reads and how long each may be, in Call Settings or per agent. If the answer is not in those passages, it will not say it, and you choose what happens then: it says it will find out, or it takes a callback request.
Each of these details matters for upkeep. A file that holds two price lists, old and new, can hand the agent the wrong passage. A forty-page brochure where the fee sits on page 31 in a table may not surface when you need it.
Give it one owner
The person who should own this is whoever already owns the facts: the admissions head, the product manager, the person who sends the new rate card round. Tell them the agent is on their distribution list. When a price, a policy, a branch or a date changes, they replace the file or read the page again, the same day.
Nothing updates itself. A page or price list that changed on your side stays as it was here until someone replaces it or reads it in again. Anything not updated in three months is called out on the page, which gives your owner an easy place to start each month.
Structure files for the question
- One topic per document where you can: fees, eligibility, refunds, branches. It makes replacing one fact simple.
- Remove old versions when you add new ones. Deleting a document removes its text for good, so keep your own copy.
- Write the way a caller asks. “Is the hostel fee separate from the mess fee?” with its answer will match better than a bare table.
- Prefer text you can read over scans. A scan that could not be read says which pages, so open it and check.
You can upload PDFs and Word or Excel documents in the current formats, type text in, or read website pages in. An old .doc or .xls needs saving as .docx or .xlsx first.
Try a question before a caller does
Try a question shows exactly the text an agent would read, for the agent you pick. After every update, try the three questions that change most: the price, the deadline, and the exception. If the right passage does not appear, that is your problem, and you found it before a customer did.
Check the state of each document as well. A document marked Indexing, Failed or No readable text is not used on calls. Only a Live agent or a member of a Live team uses it on real calls.
Remember that agent tests and the Simulation Lab don't use the knowledge base, so they will not catch a stale fee. A test call will.
Let your calls tell you what is missing
Conversation Intelligence lists the questions nobody could answer on the calls it read. Answer one and it goes into the knowledge base you pick. Over a few months this builds a better set of documents than anyone would have written from a desk, since it comes from what callers really ask.
Keep different specialists on different documents
Knowledge is kept per agent and per team member. On a team, your support specialist can answer from support documents, and your sales specialist from product sheets, and neither wanders into the other's material. See Agent Teams for how that works.
What it costs
Two things are charged. Each call that looks something up is charged the knowledge-base price for every billed minute, even when your plan's minutes cover the talk. A call that never used it is not charged that price. Each website page read in is charged too, and reading a page again is charged only when it changed. Uploaded files are not charged. The figures are on the pricing page.
That per-minute charge is a reason to think about what needs a knowledge base at all. A simple payment reminder with the amount and date coming from your list may not need one. An admissions line where callers ask about everything probably does.
When a tool is the better answer
A knowledge base suits facts that are the same for everyone. For anything specific to one customer, like an order's status or a balance due, use a tool that asks your own system, so the agent always gets the current value. If you find yourself uploading a fresh order sheet every morning, it may be time to make that switch.