Tutorial: Set Up a Customer Support Bot

In this tutorial, you’ll build a customer support chatbot for your website. By the end, your visitors will be able to get instant answers to common questions, and complex issues can be handed off to your team.

Scenario: You run a SaaS product (or e-commerce store) with a help center. Your support team keeps answering the same questions — “How do I reset my password?”, “What’s your return policy?”, “How do I upgrade my plan?” You want a chatbot that handles these automatically.

Time needed: About 20 minutes.

What you’ll learn:

• How to crawl a CMS-based help center with clean content extraction
• How to write an effective support bot personality
• How to set up suggested questions for common topics
• How to enable human handoff for issues the bot can’t solve
• How to embed and test the widget on your site

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Step 1: Add your help center as a source

1. Go to Knowledge Base → ”+ Add Source” → Website.
2. Enter the URL of your help center (e.g., https://help.yourproduct.com).
3. Let ChatbotIQ discover pages.

Configure crawling for a CMS site

Most help centers run on WordPress, Zendesk, Intercom, or similar CMS platforms. These need Reader Mode to strip out navigation and sidebars:

4. Before starting the crawl, adjust the settings:

   • Mode: Standard (if your help center has a sitemap — most do).
   • Reader Mode: ON — this strips navigation, sidebars, and footer content.
   • Concurrency: 5—10.

5. Review the discovered pages. Deselect any pages that aren’t helpful (like tag archives, author pages, or “Contact us” pages where the content is just a form).

6. Click Start Crawl.

Why Reader Mode? Without it, every page would include your help center’s navigation menu, sidebar links, and footer — polluting your bot’s knowledge base with repeated content that isn’t useful for answering questions.

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Step 2: Add FAQ entries for common questions

While the crawl runs, add Q&A entries for your most common questions — things like support hours, cancellation policy, or account setup steps. See Add PDFs and Q&A Sources for the full walkthrough.

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Step 3: Create the support bot

1. Go to Bots → “Create Bot”.
2. Name: “Support Assistant” (or whatever fits your brand).
3. Sources: Select both your website source and Q&A source.
4. Model: GPT-5 Mini is great for support — fast responses at low cost.
5. Behavior: Here’s a template you can customize:

You are a friendly and helpful customer support assistant for [Company Name].

Your job is to help customers find answers to their questions about our product.

Guidelines:
- Be warm, patient, and professional
- Always cite the source of your information
- If you're not sure about something, say so rather than guessing
- For billing or account-specific questions, suggest the customer contact support
- Keep answers concise -- most customers want quick answers

6. Support: Enable human handoff so complex issues can be escalated to your team. Choose “Both” as the trigger mode so visitors can click a button or be auto-escalated. Optionally enable the contact form as a fallback for when agents are offline.
7. Click Create.

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Step 4: Configure support-specific settings

Open your bot settings (gear icon in the Playground):

Suggested questions

Set up 3—5 starter prompts that cover your most common topics:

• “How do I reset my password?”
• “What plans are available?”
• “How do I contact support?”
• “What’s your refund policy?”

These appear when a visitor first opens the chat, giving them a quick starting point.

Enable source citations

Make sure Include Source Citations is ON. This lets visitors click through to the full help article if they want more detail.

Set the RAG threshold

Start with the default (0.25). If the bot is answering with irrelevant content, raise it. If it’s saying “I don’t know” too often, lower it.

Enable human handoff (if not done during creation)

If you skipped the Support step in the wizard, you can still enable handoff afterwards. Open the Support tab in bot settings. See Enable Human Handoff for setup steps.

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Step 5: Design the widget

Customize the widget to match your brand. For support bots, the headset launcher icon and an inviting header like “Need help?” work well. See Match Your Widget to Your Brand for the full walkthrough.

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Step 6: Test thoroughly

Before going live, test these scenarios in the Playground:

• Common questions: Ask the top 5 questions your support team gets. Do the answers match what your team would say?
• Edge cases: Ask something not in your knowledge base. Does the bot handle it gracefully?
• Follow-ups: Start a conversation and ask a follow-up question. Does the bot maintain context?
• Handoff: If you enabled handoff, try triggering it.

Use the Debug panel to check retrieval quality. Look for:

• High confidence scores on common questions.
• Correct source citations.
• No irrelevant content being pulled in.

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Step 7: Embed and launch

1. Switch to the Embed tab.
2. Set the bot to Public mode.
3. Set Allowed Domains to your website’s domain.
4. Copy the embed code and add it to your website.

Pro tip: Start by embedding only on your help center pages. Monitor conversations for a few days, fix any issues, then expand to your main website.

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After launch: monitor and improve

The first week is crucial. Here’s what to do:

1. Check Conversations daily — look at actual chats and see how the bot performs.
2. Review thumbs-down feedback — these tell you exactly what needs fixing.
3. Check Analytics — look for knowledge gaps and low-confidence topics.
4. Add Q&A entries — for common questions the bot gets wrong, add manual Q&A pairs.
5. Refine the personality — if the tone isn’t right, adjust the system prompt.

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Related

• Enable Human Handoff — detailed handoff configuration
• Find and Fix Knowledge Gaps — improve coverage over time
• Improve Your Bot’s Answers — tuning guide