Customer support is one of the most common RAG applications: answering questions from help articles, policies and past resolutions.
Content Sources
- Help centre articles and FAQs.
- Product documentation and release notes.
- Policies: refunds, shipping, warranties.
- Resolved tickets, carefully filtered for quality and privacy.
Design Principles
- Answer from approved content only, with links to the article used.
- Know the limits: account-specific questions need authenticated tools or a person, not retrieval.
- Hand off gracefully: detect frustration, sensitive topics and repeated failure, and route to a human with the conversation attached.
- Match the brand's tone.
Measuring Success
- Resolution rate without escalation (verified, not just "the chat ended").
- Customer satisfaction after the conversation.
- Accuracy on a test set of common questions.
- Escalation quality: did humans receive useful context?
Learn From Failures
Review conversations where answers were wrong or customers escalated. Often the fix is a missing or unclear help article, which improves self-service for everyone.
Risks
Wrong answers about refunds or commitments can have legal and financial consequences. Keep policies current, avoid inventing commitments, and review high-risk topics carefully.