Best practices. What makes answers good in practice.
Six basics for the chatbot, inbox and mail agent. You can put each of them into practice in the dashboard today.
Good answers start with good content.
- The chatbot only answers from what it finds. Shipping, returns, payment, delivery times and contact should be public pages on your website.
- If answers live on a help site such as help.yourstore.com, Alpheris reads it along with your website. You can add individual pages, and they are checked for changes every night.
- If you use GitBook, Confluence or a Zendesk or Intercom help center, connect it under Integrations. Your knowledge then stays up to date by itself.
- Look at the open questions on the home page regularly. They show what customers asked and where an answer was still missing.
A few buttons that really help.
- Alpheris builds the start menu from your catalog and pages, with at most three items and only for topics the chatbot can answer.
- Add your own buttons for what people ask most in your store, for example order status or size advice.
- Check every button once in the preview: it should lead to a clear answer, not to a follow-up question.
Instructions for the how, knowledge for the what.
- Instructions set tone and procedure, such as formal or informal address, signature, or when to ask for the order number. You choose whether they apply to the chatbot, the mail agent or both.
- Facts like prices, deadlines and conditions belong in the knowledge base, so the chatbot and mail agent use the same source.
- Keep them short and unambiguous, one rule per instruction.
Decide when your team takes over.
- In the escalation rules you set per topic whether the AI answers, writes a draft or hands over to your team right away.
- The mail agent never replies to complaints on its own. At most it writes a draft that a person approves.
- If the AI doesn't know something, it says so and hands over. Look at these handovers: often just one page is missing from the knowledge base.
Approve first, automate later.
- Start with drafts your team approves. That way you see how the mail agent writes before it sends on its own.
- Each mailbox has two thresholds: the confidence at which a draft is written and the one at which the mail agent sends on its own. Only raise the second once the drafts fit.
- When you close a conversation, Alpheris learns the answer, anonymized. Cleanly closed conversations make the next answers better.
Consent first.
- Analytics, proactive prompts and cart events only run in the chatbot after consent in the cookie banner.
- A link to your privacy policy sits below the chat. On Shopify it is your store's policy, otherwise the privacy page read from your website. Check once that it is correct.
- For your privacy policy, you'll find hosting, subprocessors and the DPA on our security page.
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