Getting your help centre ready

You do not need to tidy your documentation before sending it to us. Scattered and inconsistent is the normal case. But a few things genuinely change answer quality, and they are worth knowing about.

What does not matter

Inconsistent wording. Search by meaning handles the case where your customers say "delivery" and your articles say "shipping".

Structure and organisation. Categories, tags and navigation are not used to find answers. A flat pile of articles retrieves as well as a neat hierarchy.

Length. Long articles are split into sections and retrieved a section at a time, so a 4,000-word guide is not penalised.

Typos and informality. Neither affects retrieval.

What matters a great deal

Coverage. Karas cannot answer what nobody has written. This is the single biggest factor, and the report we send you at setup is mostly about this.

Contradictions. Two articles that disagree are the worst input. The assistant will faithfully reproduce whichever one it retrieves, so the answer becomes a coin toss. If you fix one thing, fix these.

Staleness. An article describing last year's returns window will be quoted confidently. Out-of-date documentation does not produce hesitant answers; it produces wrong ones.

Answers that live only in screenshots. Text inside an image is invisible to us. A procedure that exists only as annotated screenshots cannot be answered from. Add a text version of the steps.

Content behind a login. If we cannot read it, we cannot answer from it. Send us an export instead.

What to send if you can

A sample of real customer questions — fifty is plenty, from your helpdesk's search or your most common tickets. We run these through the indexed documentation and the report becomes specific to your actual queue rather than to questions we invented.

What the report tells you

Three lists: questions answered well, questions answered poorly with the article that was used, and questions that could not be answered at all. The third list is a documentation backlog ordered by what your customers actually ask. Several customers have told us it was the most useful audit of their help centre they had ever had.