The company
This is an industrial automation company. The people who write in are not end users. They are the engineers building machines, with a specification to meet and a deadline behind it, and their questions are as technical as the products themselves.
The problem
The answers existed, but they were spread out. Product documentation in one place, guides in another, training material in a third, and the best worked answers of all buried inside old support tickets. An engineer had to know where to look, or open a ticket and wait for somebody to go and find the same page for them.
What the documentation team wanted was for customers to be able to ask the documents directly, and to get answers that come only from the documents and say where they came from. In this industry a wrong detail is worse than no answer, so not finding one had to be an acceptable thing for the chat to say.
How it runs
The technical library was loaded in, and the agents work only from it. The instructions are strict about what they may do.
- It answers in the language it was asked in, links the source it used with the section, and asks which product is meant when that is not clear. No pricing, no comparisons with other companies, nothing about other customers.
- A rating sits under every answer, so somebody working through several questions can mark each one separately.
- On a support ticket the agent drafts a customer-ready answer with a confidence level and source links, and leaves it as an internal note for the engineer. It stays quiet on meeting requests, thank-you notes and spam.
- A regular digest goes to the documentation team: what the chat was asked, which answers were rated badly, and where the knowledge had gaps. The gaps go straight into the documentation backlog.
How it is going
Use has grown steadily rather than spiked. Weekly volume roughly doubled in its first months and has stayed there, which is the shape worth having: engineers came back, rather than trying it once and drifting off.
Most questions never become a ticket at all. Well over twice as many arrive at the chat as reach the support desk, and the ones that do reach it arrive with an answer already drafted, waiting for the engineer rather than the other way round.
The work behind each answer is not small. A single question sends the agents back through the library many times over before they reply, and that is what keeps an answer anchored to a document instead of to a guess.
What is next
What started as a search box for the manuals has become a feedback loop for the documentation itself. The documentation team reads the poorly rated answers and the gaps, traces each one back to the page that should have covered it, and fixes the page.
The reporting is growing with it. Response time per question is on the list, so the team can watch the chat get faster as well as more accurate.