AI Answers

NEW Say hello to a smarter, faster way to delight your customers: an AI-powered agent in Help Scout! Whether you’re managing a busy support queue or striving to create a seamless customer experience, AI Answers is here to revolutionize the way you work.

Powered by OpenAI, this feature uses your Docs knowledge base to provide instant, accurate responses to common questions from your Beacon, freeing up valuable time for the human touch where it matters most. Ready to see how AI can transform your support workflow?

AI answers is available to all contact-based billing plans. 

Before You Get Started

You’ll need a Docs site and a Beacon to get started with AI Answers. 

Docs

Your Docs articles are where AI Answers gets all of its information to help your visitors. Having a solid foundation of information in your knowledge base is the most important step to success. Head over to Get Started With Docs for help with getting your Docs site up and running. 

To use Docs articles that only appear in your Beacon and AI answers without publishing a Docs website, check out Control Access to Docs With Beacon for help. 

Note: If you aren't using Help Scout Docs for your knowledge base, you can add additional sources to pull data from and still use AI Answers, but you will still need to create a Docs site at this time to get the options for AI Answers. Just create a single empty article and publish it and then you'l be able to select that Docs site in your Beacon.

Beacon 

You’ll need at least one Beacon with Docs enabled, and you’ll need to have that Beacon embedded in your web-based app or website. Check out Create a New Beacon if you need help creating a one, and Add Beacon to Your Website or App for more help with installing your new Beacon. 

Note: AI Answers is not yet available for Beacon installed in your mobile apps using the SDK.

Enable AI Answers in Beacon

Head to Manage > Beacons. Select the Docs-enabled Beacon you want to use, then Edit Beacon. Choose Docs from the left navigation menu, then toggle Enable AI Answers to on.

Review the Docs settings to make sure that you're including the sources you want, then click Save at the bottom of the page.

Choose the mode that will work best for your visitors.

  • Self service — Visitors will only see AI Answers to start and get other options if they need further help
  • Neutral — Visitors can choose to search Docs or reach out to your team in addition to the AI Answers option.

That's it — AI Answers is now available to your Beacon visitors!

Customize the Prompt

In the world of AI, the prompt is the input given to the AI to get the response. Customize the prompt that AI Answers uses to tailor its reponse to better match your company and brand, and customize each Beacon to be unique.

Head to Manage > Beacons > [Choose Your Beacon] > Edit Beacon > AI Answers to find Voice & Tone, where you can tell the AI how to talk to your customers from this Beacon.

Changes to this field update almost immediately.

By default AI Answers just works from the Docs information — leave this field empty if that's all you want.

Notes on use: The Customize AI tool cannot be used to introduce new information to the AI — but you can adjust messaging about information that exists in Docs here. We recommend you test a bit after making adjustments to see the results of your changes.

Add Additional Sources

You can have AI Answers pull data from any publicly accessible website to use as a source when answering your visitors. Just head to Manage > Beacons > [Choose Your Beacon] > Edit Beacon > AI Answers to find Additional Sources where you can add sites to be synced with AI Answers in your Beacon.

Make sure you scroll down the page and click Save after entering your new source.

Note: This sync can take several minutes if it's syncing a large site! Be sure to scroll down and click Save to save your new source, and it will be available when the sync is finished.

AI Answers will crawl the pages from your additional sources and will use any text it finds there to answer questions, along with your Docs knowledge base.

For example, our new source page shown in the example above contains customer testimonials, and now AI Answers is able to answer a query asking for customer testimonials!

The sync will pick up any subdirectories and pages that expand from the source you enter.

For example, if you were to use https://www.jgclothing.xyz, that would also pick up https://www.jgclothing.xyx/contact and https://www.jgclothing.xyz/about/team.

If you don't want to include all pages under the source you enter, you'd need to enter them in separately.

For example, if you wanted the /contact page to be sourced but did not want the /about/team page sourced, you would need to enter https://www.jgclothing.xyz/contact but not https://www.jgclothing.xyx.

Reporting

Select the Insights tab to view statistics about Beacon activity, including AI Answers.

Engagement

Engagement shows how all Beacon sessions ended, including visitors that did not engage with AI Answers.

AI Answers

Shows the breakdown of AI Answers conversations by resolution.

Resolution Definitions

  • Contact helped — an answer was provided and the visitor did not indicate that they needed more help.
  • Contact not helped — the visitor indicated that they needed more help but did not reach out to your team.
  • Human escalation — visitor chose to chat with your team or send an email for further help.

Review Conversations

From Manage > Beacons, select the Beacon with AI Answers, then choose the Sessions tab at the top of the page.

A session refers to an individual interaction with AI Answers that has taken place on this Beacon. Filter results by time frame or resolution by selecting options from the dropdown menus at the top left of the table.

Click Export in the top right corner to export a CSV of the conversations.

Click on any line to view the entire conversation in-app.

Use the arrows on the right to navigate through conversations without returning to the list.

Reviewing the conversations here will show you what the AI is able to answer, and what it is not. Use that data to refine your Docs articles to help make the AI more useful.

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