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Troubleshooting

The agent says it does not know

Search your own knowledge for the fact first. If it is genuinely not there, the agent was right — 'our hours are not listed in what I have here' is an honest answer to a website that does not list its hours, and no amount of configuration will fix a fact you never wrote down. If the fact is there and the agent still missed it, you have a retrieval problem, and the fix is different.

Updated 2026-09-19 · 4 min read · More in troubleshooting

Is the fact anywhere?

Look for it on your website as a customer would. A surprising share of 'the agent does not know our hours' turns out to be a website that has never published its hours, or publishes them in an image, or buries them in a PDF nobody links to.

That is a content gap, not a product fault, and the agent behaved correctly by declining rather than inventing an answer. The fix is one note under Knowledge stating the fact plainly — and, separately, probably a change to your website, since every customer who did not ask the agent had the same problem.

Is the source ready?

Knowledge sources move from pending to ready as they are processed, and only ready sources are searched. A knowledge list that is still mostly pending is the usual reason a freshly built agent seems to know nothing about a site it just crawled.

Also check the page was reachable at all. Anything behind a login, a password or a cookie wall was never read, because it cannot be — the crawler sees what an anonymous visitor sees.

  1. Open Knowledge

    Confirm the source covering this fact is listed and ready, not pending or failed.

  2. Confirm it is public

    Open the URL in a private window. If you cannot read it signed out, neither could we.

  3. Re-ask in the test chat

    Same question, exact words a customer would use.

The fact is there and it still misses

This is the real retrieval case, and it has a characteristic shape: the sentence you want is buried inside a page that is mostly repeated navigation, header and footer, so the passage that gets found is the boilerplate rather than the answer. A long policy page with one relevant sentence loses to a short page that is entirely about the topic.

The reliable fix is a note. One or two sentences, written as the answer to the question, with the words a customer would actually use. Then ask again. Short, specific notes retrieve far better than long documents, and they are quicker to write than they are to argue about.

When it should not answer at all

Some questions should never be answered by an agent — an account-specific dispute, a medical or legal judgement, anything where being confidently wrong is expensive. For those, the right outcome is not a better answer but a person, and that means handover being switched on and a real number or a real rota behind it.

An agent that says it does not know and offers nothing is failing. An agent that says it does not know and hands the customer to somebody who does is working exactly as intended.

FAQ

Related questions

You can, and you should not. An agent instructed to always have an answer will invent one, and an invented price or policy reaches a real customer with complete confidence. Fix the knowledge instead.

Still stuck? A person will answer.