Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

ZLyons
Participant | Diamond Partner
Participant | Diamond Partner

Customer Agent best practices?

SOLVE

Hello HS community!

Our team has been setting up our Customer Agent to provide 24 hour support for customers and I was curious: what best practices your team have found?

 

Here are some of our findings:


Utilize a knowledge base to ground the chatbot's responses
  • Ensure the chatbot provides more accurate and relevant information by drawing from a curated set of documents
  • It's important to consider the format of the knowledge base documents
    • Pasting content into markdown or text files can help when PDFs can't be parsed
  • The knowledge base should contain relevant information such as industry facts, company data, and buyer beliefs
  • Regularly update and refine the knowledge base content
For assigning conversations to team members in HubSpot, ensure the correct settings are configured
  • This includes checking personal notification settings and assigning agents to chatflows
When building a knowledge base, consider how the language aligns with potential user queries
  • Including synonyms or common terms in the articles can increase the likelihood of relevant articles being retrieved
    • Our team found that the customer agent can struggle with semantics, for example even when provided a knowledge base titled "Pricing Document" prompts using the word "price" would return relevant answers but queries about "cost" went unanswered.
For knowledge base articles, consider including information that could answer potential follow-up questions
  • Including follow-up questions in the answers provided by your articles can help lead to more comprehensive and helpful chatbot responses
Consider a beta deployment of the chatbot to gather user feedback and identify knowledge gaps in real-world interactions
  • Once you have an initial knowledge base put together, go live! The customer agent's "Performance" tab has a "Knowledge Gaps" section that will give you feedback where your knowledge base is failing to answer questions
Continuously evaluate the chatbot's performance
  • Make it a habit to regularly check your conversations inbox to see how users are interacting with your agent
  • To keep your team looped in:
    • Send messages notifying your team when a new conversation comes in or is assigned to a human
    • HubSpot workflows offer slack/teams/google chat/ integrations as well as email sending
Explore options for handling scenarios where the bot cannot answer
  • Set up the rules in your chatflow for how the chatbot should handle transferring to a human, if your team has someone assigned to that role
  • Alternatively, if you cannot connect your users to a live representative of your team, enable email collection in your agent, allowing you to reach out and follow up with them

What best practices have you found to improve Customer agent performance?

1 Accepted solution
BrettLee1
Solution
Member

Customer Agent best practices?

SOLVE

@ZLyons تطبيق انمي wrote:

Hello HS community!

Our team has been setting up our Customer Agent to provide 24 hour support for customers and I was curious: what best practices your team have found?

 

Here are some of our findings:


Utilize a knowledge base to ground the chatbot's responses
  • Ensure the chatbot provides more accurate and relevant information by drawing from a curated set of documents
  • It's important to consider the format of the knowledge base documents
    • Pasting content into markdown or text files can help when PDFs can't be parsed
  • The knowledge base should contain relevant information such as industry facts, company data, and buyer beliefs
  • Regularly update and refine the knowledge base content
For assigning conversations to team members in HubSpot, ensure the correct settings are configured
  • This includes checking personal notification settings and assigning agents to chatflows
When building a knowledge base, consider how the language aligns with potential user queries
  • Including synonyms or common terms in the articles can increase the likelihood of relevant articles being retrieved
    • Our team found that the customer agent can struggle with semantics, for example even when provided a knowledge base titled "Pricing Document" prompts using the word "price" would return relevant answers but queries about "cost" went unanswered.
For knowledge base articles, consider including information that could answer potential follow-up questions
  • Including follow-up questions in the answers provided by your articles can help lead to more comprehensive and helpful chatbot responses
Consider a beta deployment of the chatbot to gather user feedback and identify knowledge gaps in real-world interactions
  • Once you have an initial knowledge base put together, go live! The customer agent's "Performance" tab has a "Knowledge Gaps" section that will give you feedback where your knowledge base is failing to answer questions
Continuously evaluate the chatbot's performance
  • Make it a habit to regularly check your conversations inbox to see how users are interacting with your agent
  • To keep your team looped in:
    • Send messages notifying your team when a new conversation comes in or is assigned to a human
    • HubSpot workflows offer slack/teams/google chat/ integrations as well as email sending
Explore options for handling scenarios where the bot cannot answer
  • Set up the rules in your chatflow for how the chatbot should handle transferring to a human, if your team has someone assigned to that role
  • Alternatively, if you cannot connect your users to a live representative of your team, enable email collection in your agent, allowing you to reach out and follow up with them

What best practices have you found to improve Customer agent performance?


In addition to your practices, refine NLP models for better understanding, set up clear human handoff triggers, proactively engage users, and integrate multi-channel support. Gather feedback through surveys, ensure context retention during handoffs, and track success metrics like FRT and CSAT for continuous improvement in chatbot performance.

View solution in original post

2 Replies 2
BrettLee1
Solution
Member

Customer Agent best practices?

SOLVE

@ZLyons تطبيق انمي wrote:

Hello HS community!

Our team has been setting up our Customer Agent to provide 24 hour support for customers and I was curious: what best practices your team have found?

 

Here are some of our findings:


Utilize a knowledge base to ground the chatbot's responses
  • Ensure the chatbot provides more accurate and relevant information by drawing from a curated set of documents
  • It's important to consider the format of the knowledge base documents
    • Pasting content into markdown or text files can help when PDFs can't be parsed
  • The knowledge base should contain relevant information such as industry facts, company data, and buyer beliefs
  • Regularly update and refine the knowledge base content
For assigning conversations to team members in HubSpot, ensure the correct settings are configured
  • This includes checking personal notification settings and assigning agents to chatflows
When building a knowledge base, consider how the language aligns with potential user queries
  • Including synonyms or common terms in the articles can increase the likelihood of relevant articles being retrieved
    • Our team found that the customer agent can struggle with semantics, for example even when provided a knowledge base titled "Pricing Document" prompts using the word "price" would return relevant answers but queries about "cost" went unanswered.
For knowledge base articles, consider including information that could answer potential follow-up questions
  • Including follow-up questions in the answers provided by your articles can help lead to more comprehensive and helpful chatbot responses
Consider a beta deployment of the chatbot to gather user feedback and identify knowledge gaps in real-world interactions
  • Once you have an initial knowledge base put together, go live! The customer agent's "Performance" tab has a "Knowledge Gaps" section that will give you feedback where your knowledge base is failing to answer questions
Continuously evaluate the chatbot's performance
  • Make it a habit to regularly check your conversations inbox to see how users are interacting with your agent
  • To keep your team looped in:
    • Send messages notifying your team when a new conversation comes in or is assigned to a human
    • HubSpot workflows offer slack/teams/google chat/ integrations as well as email sending
Explore options for handling scenarios where the bot cannot answer
  • Set up the rules in your chatflow for how the chatbot should handle transferring to a human, if your team has someone assigned to that role
  • Alternatively, if you cannot connect your users to a live representative of your team, enable email collection in your agent, allowing you to reach out and follow up with them

What best practices have you found to improve Customer agent performance?


In addition to your practices, refine NLP models for better understanding, set up clear human handoff triggers, proactively engage users, and integrate multi-channel support. Gather feedback through surveys, ensure context retention during handoffs, and track success metrics like FRT and CSAT for continuous improvement in chatbot performance.

PamCotton
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

Customer Agent best practices?

SOLVE

Hey @ZLyons, Happy Monday!

 

Thanks so much for sharing these great best practices! They’re really helpful.  @TomM2 and @Lucila-Andimol curious if you’ve had any additional tips or experiences with improving Customer Agent performance? 

 

Would love to read your thoughts!

 

Pam