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ChatbotIQ

Tutorial: Build an AI Customer Support Bot from Your Help Center

In this tutorial, you’ll build an AI customer support chatbot that answers from your help center. By the end, your visitors will get instant answers to common questions, each with a link to the help article it came from, and complex issues can be handed off to your team.

ChatbotIQ is a European platform that turns your help center, documentation, or website into an AI assistant. It answers only from your content, links to its sources, and says so when your content doesn’t cover a question.

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

Step 1: Add your help center as a source

Section titled “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).

Configure crawling for a CMS site

Section titled “Configure crawling for a CMS site”

Most help centers run on WordPress, Zendesk, Intercom, or similar CMS platforms. Before discovery starts, check the settings on the same screen:

  1. Under Configuration mode, choose Manual and adjust the settings:

    • Discovery Mode: Sitemap Discovery (if your help center has a sitemap - most do).
    • Advanced Options → Content Extraction → Reader Mode: ON (the default). It strips navigation, banners, and other page furniture.
    • Advanced Options → Performance → Concurrency: 5-10.

  2. Click Start Discovery. ChatbotIQ finds your help center’s pages.

  3. 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).

  4. Click Start Crawling.

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.

Step 2: Add FAQ entries for common questions

Section titled “Step 2: Add FAQ entries for common questions”

While the crawl runs, add a Q&A Pairs source with 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.

Q&A Pairs is a second source. The trial and all paid plans include several sources; the Free plan includes one, so on Free skip this step.

Step 3: Create the support bot

Section titled “Step 3: Create the support bot”
  1. Go to Bots → “Create Bot”.
  2. Basic Info: Name it “Support Assistant” (or whatever fits your brand) and choose Customer Support as the bot type. This adds support-specific rules to the bot’s built-in prompt.
  3. Sources: Select both your website source and your Q&A source.
  4. Model: GPT-5 Mini (the recommended default) is great for support - fast responses at low cost.
  5. Behavior: Paste this template into Base Prompt and customize it:
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
- For billing or account-specific questions, suggest the customer contact support
- Keep answers concise - most customers want quick answers

The personality only needs tone and focus. ChatbotIQ adds its own rules underneath: answer from your knowledge base, cite sources, and say when something is not covered.

  1. Support: Enable human handoff so complex issues can be escalated to your team. Set Trigger mode to Both so visitors can click a button, and the bot also offers a handoff when it can’t answer. When no agent is online, visitors can leave their email instead. Optionally enable the contact form so visitors can send your team a message when the bot can’t help.
  2. Review the summary and click Create Bot. You land in the Playground.

Step 4: Configure support-specific settings

Section titled “Step 4: Configure support-specific settings”

Open Bot Settings (the gear icon in the Playground):

Suggested questions

Section titled “Suggested questions”

In the Behavior tab, add 3-5 starter prompts that cover your most common topics (up to 6; the widget shows 3 by default):

  • “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.

Keep source citations on

Section titled “Keep source citations on”

Make sure Include source citations (Behavior tab) is on. It is on by default. This lets visitors click through to the full help article if they want more detail.

Set Minimum Answer Confidence

Section titled “Set Minimum Answer Confidence”

In the Advanced tab, start with the default (0.30). 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)

Section titled “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.

Step 5: Design the widget

Section titled “Step 5: Design the widget”

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

Step 6: Test thoroughly

Section titled “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.

Click Debug to open the RAG Debug panel and check retrieval quality. Look for:

  • High scores on the retrieved chunks for common questions.
  • Correct source citations.
  • No irrelevant content being pulled in.

Step 7: Embed and launch

Section titled “Step 7: Embed and launch”
  1. In Bot Settings → Advanced, set Privacy to Public.
  2. Under Allowed Domains, add your website’s domain. If you leave the list empty, any site can embed the bot.
  3. Switch to the Deploy tab, open Website widget, and click Copy Code.
  4. Add the code 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.

After launch: monitor and improve

Section titled “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 - filter Conversations by Thumbs down; these tell you exactly what needs fixing.
  3. Check Analytics - look at Coverage Gaps and low-confidence answers.
  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 Base Prompt.

Ready to try it on your help center?

Section titled “Ready to try it on your help center?”

Start your free 14-day trial and have a support bot answering from your own help center in about 20 minutes. No credit card needed.

Short on time? Send us your help center address and we’ll prepare the assistant for you.

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