Optimizing Your Help Center for AI Agents

The goal of a help center is to empower customers to resolve issues independently, increasing engagement while reducing support ticket volume and operational costs. Great help centers are thoughtfully organized, up-to-date, and clear. This is especially important when implementing AI support agents so that responses are as accurate as possible.

A well-organized documentation system enables Decagon's AI agents to provide high-quality responses by drawing from both internal and external knowledge sources — resulting in better CSAT and deflection rates. Decagon’s AI agents also continuously improve your support ecosystem by proactively identifying knowledge gaps and surfacing suggestions to make your documentation more comprehensive.


Here are 10 ways to maximize the value of your help center:

1. Keep articles to a Question & Answer format. This makes both user navigation and information retrieval easier.
2. Break complex instructions into concise steps. Steps should be simple enough to understand clearly but detailed enough to take action.
3. Use structured formatting. Use headings and subheadings to group related inquires. Processes should be broken up into bullet points or numbered lists. Specific copy (like pages or buttons) should be styled text.
4. Use hyperlinks for in-product or article references.
5. Keep answers distinct with their own sections. If there are multiple questions being answered in the same help center article, ensure they each have their own section. It is much easier for an AI agent to retrieve the correct details for all potential user queries when answers are clearly delineated. Don’t try to combine multiple answers or questions.
6. Use precise, specific keywords. For example, if you have different tiers of membership, make sure you explicitly say which tier you are referring to in your answer. Using specific keywords is also beneficial for differentiating answers.
7. Keep articles to less than 1500 words. If an article is longer than 1500 words or a specific intent is not part of the larger workflow, create a new article. Articles that bloated with too much information or irrelevant details are difficult to navigate.
8. Keep documentation current with specific dates. When updating both public and internal docs, include release dates for new features, anticipate common questions, and remove outdated content.
9. Add reference photos when necessary. Annotations are additionally helpful if your company has the bandwidth to keep them up to date.
10. Clearly surface your AI support agent channel. If a user cannot find the answer to the query, it’s very helpful to offer them a direct channel to get additional help. With Decagon’s embedded widget, this is extremely easy to incorporate into your help center.

While optimizing your help center requires dedicated effort, the return on investment is substantial. A well-maintained help center not only empowers customers to find answers quickly, it also helps build a strong foundation for effective AI support.

By implementing these best practices, you'll create a powerful knowledge base that serves multiple purposes. Your customers benefit from improved self-service capabilities, your AI agents deliver more accurate and helpful responses, and your support team doesn’t have to spend time on questions with answers that can be found in public documentation.

A thoughtfully optimized help center isn't just a nice-to-have – it's a crucial component of delivering exceptional customer support at scale.