A general AI model knows a great deal about the world and nothing about your business. An assistant that is useful to your customers works the other way round: it answers from your information and nothing else. The quality of its answers depends almost entirely on what you give it.
How it uses your content
When a customer asks a question, the assistant looks through your material for the passages that relate to it, and writes its answer from those passages. This approach is often called retrieval-augmented generation.
The practical consequence: if a fact is not in your material, the assistant should say it does not know, and a well-built one does.
What to give it
Prices and what they include. Opening hours, including holidays. Location, parking and how to get there. How to book, order or get a quote. Delivery, returns, cancellation and payment policies. The questions you are tired of answering.
Write the way you would explain it to a customer. Short, plain sentences work better than marketing copy.
What to leave out
Anything out of date, such as last year's price list. Internal notes customers should not see. Long documents where one page matters: upload that page.
If two sources disagree, the assistant cannot know which is right. Remove the old one.
Common mistakes
Relying only on the website. Many business sites say little about prices or policies, so the assistant has nothing to answer from. Add a price list and a few FAQs.
Forgetting to update it. When your prices or hours change, update the source and re-read it.
Keeping it accurate
Check the list of questions the assistant could not answer. Each one is a gap in your information. In Selo Assist every unanswered question has a button that opens the FAQ form with the question filled in.
Read a handful of real conversations now and then. You will quickly see where a clearer sentence in your notes would help.