Source material
The best answers in the business are already written, in a folder nobody indexes
Somewhere in your helpdesk there is a folder of saved replies. They are written in the words customers use, they answer the questions customers actually ask, they have been refined by whoever got tired of retyping them, and they are the only documents in the business that were composed specifically to resolve a question rather than to describe a position. Almost nobody indexes them, and the reasons they cannot be indexed as they stand are worth going through one at a time, because every one of them is fixable in an afternoon.
Why this one is harder than it looks
They are full of merge fields, and a merge field is a hole where a fact should be. The first name, the order number, the date it shipped, the tracking link, the amount refunded. Extracted, those arrive either as literal bracketed tokens or as nothing at all, and a passage of prose with four holes in it is worse than a passage with four wrong numbers, because at least a wrong number looks like something somebody could question. A reply quoted back with a placeholder still in it tells the customer exactly how the sausage is made.
Each one was written to a single person about a single case, and the case is not in the text. As we discussed on the phone. Since this was delayed at our end. As a gesture on this occasion. Given how long you have been with us. Every one of those clauses is a condition that lived in the sender's head, and the template preserves the reply while discarding the situation that justified it. Indexed, the exception reads as the standard, because nothing in the words says it was an exception.
The template frequently contradicts the published policy, and the template is the one that is true. A saved reply that refunds somebody outside the window, waives a fee, or extends a deadline is a record of what your business really does, which is exactly why it is such good material and exactly why publishing it as written converts a discretion into a promise. The published policy says one thing, the folder says another, and once both are indexed they compete for the same question with no way to tell which one governs.
Nobody deletes a template, because an unused one costs nothing until the day it is indexed. The folder accumulates replies about a promotion that ended, a courier you no longer use, a fault that was fixed two releases ago, a form that has been replaced. These read as current, they are written with total confidence, and they are frequently the most specific text you own about a subject, which makes them win.
What it has to contain
Structure rather than wording. A passage pulled out of this document has to stand on its own, because that is the only form in which it will ever be read.
| One template per situation, with the situation named in the first line | Not the internal subject line, which is usually a code or an abbreviation, but a sentence saying what this is a reply to, in the words a customer would use to describe their own problem. |
|---|---|
| No merge fields anywhere, and no sentence that needed one | Each field is either replaced with what it referred to in general terms, or the sentence containing it is cut. A token standing where a figure belongs is not a gap in an answer, it is a visible piece of machinery in the middle of one. |
| The condition written into the body of the reply | If the reply only applies when the delay was your fault, when the item is unopened, or when the customer is inside a period, that has to be a clause in the text rather than a judgement the sender was making silently. |
| Two separate sets: what you always do, and what you sometimes do | The first set is publishable as written. The second is publishable only as a route to a person. Keeping them in one folder is what puts a gesture into the index dressed as a rule. |
The rewrite, in order
Read the folder and sort it into three piles before you edit anything
Pile one is the reply you would be happy to see published on your own site: how a process works, what happens next, what somebody needs to send you. Pile two is true but conditional, the gesture, the exception, the thing your team does when the circumstances warrant it. Pile three is dead, describing something that no longer exists.
Pile three gets closed without ceremony. Pile one is the material this whole exercise is for. Pile two is not thrown away, because it is the most valuable thing in the folder and the most dangerous, and it gets its own treatment later.
Do the sorting before any rewriting. Most people start editing at the top of the folder, spend an hour polishing a template about a courier they dropped last year, and lose the appetite before reaching the ones that matter.
Take the fields out and put the meaning back in
Go through pile one and deal with each placeholder. A name becomes nothing at all, because a general answer does not greet anybody. An order reference becomes a description of what the reader should look for. A number that varies by case becomes a statement of what determines it, which is more useful than the number was and cannot be wrong.
Where a sentence collapses without its field, cut the sentence. A line saying an item was dispatched on a particular date is meaningless in general and has no general version. It belongs to the conversation it was written for, and there is nothing to salvage.
Take the greeting and the sign-off out too, along with the signature block. They match nothing, they add length to every passage from the document, and a closing line thanking somebody for their patience arriving in the middle of a factual answer reads as though a person is on the other end when nobody is.
Say what the reply is a reply to
The first line of each template becomes a plain statement of the situation, phrased the way a customer would phrase it. Not the internal label. If the saved reply is filed as damaged in transit, the opening line says that this is what happens when something arrives broken, using the words broken, damaged and arrived in that condition, because those are the words that get typed.
This is the single change that decides whether the library works, and it is easy to skip because a saved reply never needed it. The sender always knew what they were replying to. A passage does not, and a document whose first line is a category name has thrown away its strongest matching text.
Where two templates cover the same situation with different wording, keep one. Near-identical passages compete for the same question, and the one that wins is decided by nothing you control.
Rewrite the discretionary pile as a route rather than an outcome
Pile two cannot be published as it stands, because a reply granting an exception becomes an exception anybody can cite. It can be published as an acknowledgement that the situation exists and a statement of what to do about it: cases like this are looked at individually, here is who looks at them, here is what to send.
That is not a fudge. It is a genuinely better answer than the alternatives, which are a refusal on the question people care most about, or a published promise your team then has to honour on every occasion including the ones it was never meant for.
Keep the original wording where your team can reach it. The point of this exercise is not to stop sending those replies. It is to stop a reply written for one person becoming a document addressed to everybody.
What happens if you skip it
A one-off kindness republished as a standing rule
Somebody asks whether they can still return something after the window has closed. The published policy says no, in careful language, under a heading about time limits. The saved reply says yes, warmly, in a sentence that begins by acknowledging how frustrating this must be, and it is a much better match for the question because it was written in response to that exact question by somebody who had just read it. The customer gets the generous answer with a citation on it, and your team finds out at the counter.
The other version is smaller and more embarrassing. A passage arrives with a bracketed token still standing in the middle of it, and the reply hands the customer a sentence with a hole where their order number should be. Nothing about that is dangerous and everything about it is corrosive, because it is the clearest possible signal that nobody read the material before publishing it.
Check it against this
Before you index it
- Every template in the index describes something the business still does
- No placeholder or merge token survives anywhere in the text
- Each reply opens by naming the situation in the customer's own words
- Greetings, sign-offs and signature blocks have been removed
- Conditional replies are published as a route to a person, never as an outcome
- No two templates in the index cover the same situation
Questions
- Can we export the whole macro library in one go?
- You can export it, and you should not index it whole. A macro library is a working tool with dead entries, duplicates and internal shorthand in it, and indexing all of it puts a great many near-identical passages into competition for the same questions. Export it, sort it, index the part that survived.
- Our templates only exist inside the helpdesk, not as files. Does that matter?
- Only in that somebody has to copy the text out. The assistant answers from indexed material and cannot open a helpdesk, look up a ticket or check anything live, so the wording has to be present as a document. A plain text or Markdown file with one situation per section is entirely adequate.
- Should the assistant sound like our email replies?
- It will sound like whatever it retrieves, which is the argument for cleaning the templates rather than for keeping their voice. Strip the apparatus of an email and what remains is a well-written explanation, which is the part you wanted. The apology and the sign-off were addressed to one person and read oddly when they arrive attached to a general answer.
Keep reading
- How to upload a PDF manual so an assistant can answer from itA linked PDF is never crawled and a scanned one yields nothing. What to do about page furniture, columns, split tables and size.
- How to use an internal knowledge base space as a customer-facing sourceInternal spaces are full of shorthand, owner names and links customers cannot open. What to export, what to rewrite, and what to leave behind.
- Using a staff handbook as a source without publishing the rest of itThe handbook answers customer questions in the second person, with pay and discipline bound in beside them. What to extract and what to leave.
- Every kind of source materialWhat to feed an assistant, and the surgery each document needs first.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.