Choosing the starter questions

An empty chat box is intimidating and gets less use than one offering a few questions to press. You can set up to four.

Why four

More than four stops being a starting point and becomes a menu, and the panel has no room for them. Four is a limit rather than a target — two good ones beat four padded ones.

What makes a good starter question

Phrase it as your customer would. "Where's my order?" beats "Order tracking information". The purpose is recognition.

Choose your highest-volume questions, not your most interesting ones. Look at your helpdesk's most common tickets or your help centre's search log.

Make sure your documentation answers it well. These are the first impression, and an assistant that fumbles its own suggested question is worse than one that offered nothing.

Spread them across topics. Four delivery questions waste three slots.

Each question also carries a short category label, shown above it, which helps a visitor scan them.

We verify each one

Before a starter question goes live we check it end to end: that the answer is correct, and that its citations resolve to the article they should. A question that does not pass is either reworded or replaced, or we tell you which article needs writing first.

This is re-run whenever your list changes and whenever your documentation is re-indexed.

They are also pre-warmed

Because we know these questions in advance, their answers are prepared ahead of time and served from memory. A pressed starter question answers in a fraction of a second, against several seconds for a question we have never seen.

One consequence worth knowing: a newly added starter question is not pre-warmed until the next deploy, so the first visitor to press it waits the full time. We handle that as part of changing the list, but it is why a change is not quite instant.

Changing them

Email support@usekaras.com with the questions you want. We verify them, warm them, and confirm when they are live.