FAQ management

Staging and production environments

The FAQ library has a staging environment and a production environment. By default, you are in the staging environment. Changes made in the staging environment must be published from the Publishing Center before they take effect in the production environment.

The bot uses the FAQs from the production environment.

You cannot add, delete, or modify FAQs in the production environment. To make changes, switch to the staging environment. After you make the changes, publish them to the production environment.

Note: If you delete a published FAQ in the staging environment, the FAQ is not immediately deleted from the production environment. To permanently delete the FAQ, you must delete it in the staging environment and then publish the change from the Publishing Center. After publishing, the FAQ is deleted from both the staging and production environments.

Create an FAQ

First, in the Category tree, select the category for the new FAQ. The selected category is highlighted in light blue.

Then, on the Q&A FAQ tab, click the blue New FAQ button below the search box.

Finally, in the dialog box that appears, enter a title and an answer to create the FAQ.

• FAQ title: Enter a standard version of the question. This improves the search hit rate.

• Alternate queries: Add similar questions to improve the accuracy of the matching algorithm. You can add up to 200 alternate queries.

• Related questions: Add related FAQs to control question recommendations. When a user's query triggers this FAQ, the system recommends other questions based on the related FAQs and the algorithm.

• Effective time: The effective period is permanent by default. If a time period is set, the entry automatically expires at the end of the period. You can specify the period in years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds.

• Tag reference: Tags help you distinguish and quickly filter FAQs. You can create tags in Global Settings > Tag Management and reference them here.

• Answer view: A view is a tag used to provide different answers to the same question for different channels, such as a WeChat channel view or an AP channel view. You can add or remove views in the view list of the session API in bot management and then select them here.

• Answer type: FAQs support three answer types: plain text, rich text, and card. You can use the editor for plain text and rich text. Rich text supports attachments, images, and videos. To obtain an image link, right-click an online image and copy the image link. The video URL must end with .mp4. Cards must be configured in the Card Workshop before you can select them here.

Edit an FAQ

Query FAQs

By default, the search box supports searches by FAQ ID and by keywords in the FAQ title.

Deactivate and delete an FAQ

You can deactivate or delete FAQs as needed. Because the system uses both a staging and a production environment, operations in the staging environment, such as deactivation and deletion, do not affect the production environment until they are published. The bot always uses the FAQs from the production environment.

Delete: When you delete an FAQ in the staging environment, it is not removed from the production environment. To permanently delete it, you must publish the change from the Publishing Center to apply the deletion to the production environment.

Deactivate: If you do not need an FAQ temporarily, you can click the Deactivate button. To use it again, click the Activate button.

Batch operations

The Batch Operations button supports three batch operations: batch delete, batch import, and batch export. Batch delete and batch export allow you to delete or export all FAQs from one or more categories at once. The default limit for a batch import is 3,000 FAQs per operation. You can increase this limit in the administrator configuration. The limit for a batch export is 50,000 FAQs. If you exceed this limit, the exported data is truncated. There is no limit for batch delete operations.

For batch import, follow the prompts to download the system template file. Enter the FAQ information into the file according to the template format, and then upload the file.

By default, imported FAQs are sorted by import time in descending order. To sort the list by FAQ ID in descending order, click the FAQ ID table header.

Note: The key words feature has been upgraded to global nouns. The key word and synonym columns in the original import template are no longer used. You do not need to delete these columns because the system automatically filters them out. To add new synonyms, go to Advanced Options > Global Nouns.

When you select the check box to the left of FAQ ID, you can perform batch transfer, download, publish, deactivation, and deletion operations on the FAQs on the current page.