Best practices

A great agent comes down to three things: good knowledge, clear instructions and a habit of reviewing what it says. This page collects the practices that make the biggest difference.

Give your agent good knowledge

Your agent answers from your sources, so the quality of its answers follows the quality of what you add.

• Start with what customers actually ask. Your FAQ, delivery and returns policy, pricing, opening hours and product or service guides cover most conversations. Add those before anything else.
• Keep each answer focused. In Free text, write one source per topic — "Refund policy", "Delivery times", "Sizing guide" — rather than one long page. Focused sources are found more reliably, and you can update one without touching the rest.
• Write the way customers ask. Use the words your customers use. If people ask "how long does shipping take?", say "shipping" as well as "delivery".
• Upload documents with real text. Scanned PDFs often have no readable text. Export them with text recognition (OCR) turned on before uploading.
• Import your help centre with its sitemap. On Websites, a sitemap brings in many pages at once, and OrbitBase re-reads website pages every 7 days so answers stay current.
• Remove what's out of date. Delete old price lists, expired promotions and retired policies. If two sources disagree, the agent may quote either one.
• Check that everything trained. A source only counts once it shows Trained. Fix anything marked Error. See Training status.

Write clear instructions

In Settings → AI, Instructions tell the agent who it works for and how to behave. You have 500 characters, so spend them on judgement, not facts — facts belong in your sources.

A strong set of instructions covers:

• Who you are — the business and what it sells.
• What the agent should help with — orders, bookings, product questions, account access.
• What it must never do — for example, promise a refund, quote a delivery date, or give medical or legal advice. Tell it to hand those to a person instead.

You are the support agent for Northwind Coffee, an online coffee roaster. Help customers choose beans, track orders and manage subscriptions. Never promise refunds or replacements — hand those to a human.

Then choose a Tone that matches your brand and a Knowledge grounding level. Balanced suits most teams. Choose Strict if answers must only ever come from your sources. See AI settings.

Test before customers do

The Playground runs the same agent your customers reach, so use it every time you change something.

• Ask your top ten questions and check each answer against your sources.
• Ask something you haven't covered. A good agent admits it doesn't know or offers a person; it shouldn't make something up.
• Try the awkward cases — an angry customer, a refund request, a question in another language, an attempt to get the agent to ignore its instructions.
• Compare instructions side by side. Click Compare a variant, edit the second variant's instructions and send both the same question. When you're happy, copy the winning version into Settings → AI and save.
• Watch the action chips. When the agent uses an action, the Playground shows what it did, such as Collect lead or Escalate to a human. Check it's using the right one at the right moment.

Make the handoff work

Escalation is how your agent brings in a person. Escalate to Human is always on, and its instructions decide when the agent uses it.

• Say when to escalate. Open Actions, edit Escalate to Human and describe your own triggers — complaints, cancellations, anything involving money, or any customer who asks for a person.
• Watch the queue. Escalated conversations wait in the inbox Queue until someone picks them up. Agree who on your team checks it, and when.
• Answer inside the messaging window. Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp only accept a business reply within 24 hours of the customer's last message. See Messaging windows.
• Use cases for longer work. If something will take days — a replacement, an investigation — open a case so it isn't lost when the chat closes. See Cases overview.

Review and improve every week

• Read a sample of conversations in Inbox → All, especially ones the agent escalated.
• Turn gaps into knowledge. When the agent couldn't answer something it should have, add a Free text answer for it, then ask the same question in the Playground.
• Save your team's best replies. Recurring answers your teammates type by hand are good candidates for saved replies — and for a knowledge source.
• Keep an eye on usage. Settings → Usage shows how many AI replies you've used this billing period, so you can upgrade before you run out. See Usage.

Next steps