Build a knowledge base from PDFs and documents
Your help centre was written for people who are already reading it. An agent needs the same facts arranged very differently.
A knowledge base is where facts live. The instruction says how the agent behaves; the knowledge base says what is true. Keeping them separate is what lets you correct a price without touching the agent's personality, and lets six bots share one set of facts.
The mistake almost everyone makes first is uploading the company brochure. Marketing prose retrieves badly because it does not state facts plainly — it implies them, in sentences designed to persuade. What an agent needs is closer to an internal cheat sheet than to anything you would publish.
Before you start
- Documents containing your actual, current facts.
- Somebody who can confirm what is out of date.
- Storage headroom: 2GB on Starter up to 120GB on Scaler.
Steps
Create the knowledge base under AI bots
Bots, bot flows and knowledge bases share the rail item. A knowledge base is not owned by a bot, which is why one can serve many.
Upload the documents that state facts plainly
Price lists, policy documents, service descriptions, opening hours, what you do and do not sell. Short and factual beats long and persuasive.
Write down what your help centre assumes
This is usually the highest-value content you can add and it does not exist yet anywhere. Which branch is which. What you refuse to do. The policy everyone quotes from memory. The three things customers always misunderstand.
An afternoon writing this down is worth more than uploading fifty existing pages.
Add the objections and their answers
If the bot qualifies or sells, the objections it will meet are known and finite. Writing the honest answer to each one is the difference between an agent that folds and one that handles a conversation.
Delete anything out of date — do not just add
A superseded price list in the knowledge base will be quoted confidently and convincingly. Removing old material is as important as adding new, and it is the step nobody schedules.
Attach it to the bot and test with real questions
Use questions customers asked last week, not the ones you wish they asked. The gap between those two sets is where most disappointing bots live.
Check it worked
Ask the bot the ten most common real questions and grade each answer as right, wrong or vague. Every wrong answer is a document to fix; every vague one is a fact you have not written down yet.
The parts people get wrong
- One knowledge base can serve many bots. Build it once for the company rather than once per bot.
- Each knowledge base shows a Used-by list of the bots relying on it. Check it before deleting anything.
- Uploads draw on your plan's storage, shared with call recordings and generated documents.