The AI is never better than what you gave it. Here's how to write it.

We ended an earlier piece on an uncomfortable sentence: the guardrails govern what the agent may do, not what it knows. If the wrong opening hours are in the portal, Kim will give the wrong opening hours, as politely as everything else.

That deserves its own piece, because it's the one part of this you actually control. And the most common cause of a bad answer isn't the technology. It's that nobody wrote the answer down.

Here's what usually separates source material that works from material that merely sounds right.

1. If the number isn't written down, it can't be said

An agent built on retrieval quotes you, it doesn't remember. That's a guardrail, not a shortcoming: it may not state a price, a deadline or a fee that wasn't fetched from your own information.

The consequence is that every number a customer might ask about has to exist in writing. What a hygienist appointment costs. How many days you have to return something. What a late cancellation costs. How far ahead people can book.

If the number is missing, the agent doesn't guess, it hands over. That's the right behaviour, but five of those a week is five calls you're paying staff to take.

2. The dangerous thing isn't the gap, it's the ambiguity

A gap in your material is harmless. The agent finds nothing, hands over, a human sorts it out.

What does damage is a sentence that appears to cover the question but doesn't.

"14-day returns" is one of those. It's true for most of what you sell and wrong for sale items, where it might be seven. The agent has no reason to hesitate: the sentence exists, it's about returns, it answers the question. The customer gets a confident, incorrect answer, and you get an argument at the till.

So hunt down your exceptions and write them in the same place as the main rule. "14-day returns. Sale items have 7 days, and gift cards aren't exchangeable." One paragraph, the whole truth.

That is the single most profitable half hour you'll spend on this.

3. Write the answer, not the topic

"See our shipping terms" is not an answer. The agent can only work with the text you gave it, and that text says nothing.

Write what you'd actually have said on the phone instead. "Shipping is 49 kronor, free over 499. Normally two to four working days."

The same goes for lists that leave out the important part. A menu with dishes but no prices doesn't answer the question people actually ask.

4. Write to be read aloud

Almost everyone misses this the first time, and it only shows up on the phone.

The same material is used across every channel. Text that looks tidy on a screen becomes gibberish when spoken: tables, bullet lists with dashes, asterisks for bold, a price list in three columns. The voice reads what's there.

Write full sentences. Write "from eleven in the morning until nine at night" rather than "11–21" if it's going to be said out loud. If you have a price list, write it as "An exterior wash is 300 kronor, inside and out is 550" instead of a table.

Simple test: read the paragraph aloud to yourself. If it sounds daft, it is daft.

5. Only point at pages that exist

If you point at your own website as a source, check the addresses.

An address that returns a 404 doesn't become an error. The page is fetched, the error message is stored as a document, and then it sits there competing to be pulled up as an answer. We found this summer that one broken link produced a 109-character document reading "This page doesn't exist" — and everything looked completely normal in the interface.

So one mistyped address is enough to put nonsense in front of customers on every channel. Click the links before you save them.

6. Don't add anything you wouldn't want quoted verbatim

Everything you put in can come back as an answer to a customer. That sounds obvious and gets forgotten anyway.

So: no personal data about individual customers, no internal notes about suppliers or staff, no prices you only give to some people. "Call Anna on her mobile if it's urgent" doesn't belong in material an agent answers from.

Internal instructions have their own place in the portal, separate from what the agent quotes. Use that distinction.

7. The unanswered-questions list is your real to-do list

When the agent can't find an answer it hands over, and the question simultaneously lands in a list in the portal.

That list is the most useful thing you'll get out of the first month. It isn't a bug report, it's a summary of what your customers actually wonder about, ordered by how often they wonder it. Most people find two or three questions they'd never thought to answer anywhere, and that staff have been answering out loud for years.

Go through it once a week for the first month. Then once a month. Every line you clear is one call fewer.

How long does this take?

Less than people think, and more than zero.

Opening hours, address, prices and the ten most common questions are enough to go live. That's an afternoon for most businesses. The exceptions and the nuance then grow out of the unanswered-questions list, which beats trying to guess them in advance.

What you shouldn't do is spend three weeks on perfect source material before you start. You will guess wrong about what customers ask. They'll happily tell you themselves, for free, from day one.

One last thing

There's a version of this work that's wasted effort: trying to rewrite your business so it sounds good to an AI.

Don't. Write down what's true, the way you'd say it to a customer on the phone. That's the whole job. An agent quoting you accurately sounds like you, and that's what you want.

If you'd like to see how far your current material gets you, book a demo and we'll set Kim up on your own information so you can ask it the hard question yourself.