A chatbot makes up answers when a customer asks something nobody taught it, and however carefully you teach an AI agent about your business, customers will ask it something you never wrote down. What matters is what happens next: whether it guesses, or tells you, and whether you find out once, or never.
Every agent meets a question it was never taught
You wrote down your prices, your hours, your delivery zones. Then on day two someone asks whether you deliver on Sundays, whether they can bring a dog, whether you take card payments over the phone. None of it is in the instructions, because nobody thinks of everything in advance.
An agent in that position can do one of two things. It can guess, and a confident wrong answer about a price or an opening time is worse than no answer. Or it can say it will check with the team. The second is right, but on its own it leaves you nothing: the same question arrives next week, and the week after, and you only notice when a customer complains.
Turning “I don’t know” into a list you can act on
DialogBrain closes that loop. When the agent cannot find the answer in your knowledge base, it is told not to guess but to answer the customer the way your instructions say, and it also notes the question for you.
Those notes go into one list in your workspace. Customers ask the same thing in many ways, “how much is shipping?”, “is delivery free?”, “what does it cost to deliver to my area?”, so questions that mean the same thing are gathered into one row with a count beside it. The row asked forty times sits at the top; the one-off question sits at the bottom. You see at a glance which missing answer costs you the most replies.
Questions that only look alike are kept apart. “When do you open?” and “when do you close?” use nearly the same words and need different answers, so they stay separate rows.
Answer once, in your own words
Opening a row shows how customers actually phrased it and links to each conversation. You write a short title and the answer, and save it. From that moment it is part of your knowledge base: the next customer who asks, in whatever words and whichever language, gets your answer from the agent.
Nothing is sent to the people who already asked, the answer is for everyone after them. And the title is yours, not a copy of a customer’s message, so a name, a phone number or anything else someone typed never ends up in the material your agent reads.
If a question keeps coming back after you answered it, the list says so: the answer is there, but the agent did not connect it to the way people ask. Rewording the question, and the answer, if needed, in the customers’ own words usually fixes it.
The agent now finds your documents in a busy inbox
While building this we found a second reason agents sometimes said “I don’t know”: the answer was in a document the owner had uploaded, and the agent still did not see it.
When an agent looks something up, it searches your documents and your past conversations together. In a workspace with years of chats, those conversations are thousands of short messages, and many of them sound a little like any question, “are you open today?”, “what time?”. They crowded the one handbook page with the real answer out of the search before it was ever weighed.
Now documents and conversations are searched separately, and your documents are always given room in what the agent reads. The handbook page is found again, and so is every answer you add from the list of unanswered questions.
What it takes from you
About five minutes a week. Open the list, answer the two or three rows at the top, hide the ones that are not about your business. After a few weeks the list is short and your agent answers most of what customers ask on its own.
Questions and answers
Why does my AI chatbot say “I don’t know” when the answer is in my documents?
Often because years of short chat messages crowded your documents out of its search, so the page with the answer was never read. DialogBrain now searches documents and conversations separately and always gives your documents room, so that page is found again.
Will the AI agent make up an answer it does not know?
It is instructed not to: when your knowledge base has no answer, it notes the question for you and replies the way your instructions say. But it can only fall back well if you tell it how, add one line to its instructions, for example: “If you don’t know, say a colleague will reply shortly.”
Do I have to answer every question?
No. Answer the ones at the top of the list, they cover most of what customers ask. Hide the ones that are not about your business, and they stop coming back.
Does the customer who asked get my answer?
Not automatically. The answer goes into your knowledge base for everyone who asks after that. If someone is still waiting, the list links to their conversation so you can reply yourself.
Does it work in other languages?
Yes. Questions asked in different languages about the same thing are grouped together, and the agent answers each customer in the language they wrote in.
Originally published at dialogbrain.com.
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