To reduce the amount of questions that you actually have to answer manually we've given our Slack bot the superpowers (and authority) to answer questions for you.

But how does that really work? In this article we're presenting both the short and the long answer to this question, as well as tips and tricks on how to help the algorithm make better suggestions.

Everything starts with the answers you add in the Knowledge section. The suggestion algorithm works by using Natural Language Processing to ingest every answer in your Knowledge section and to extract the most important topics.

Whenever you add a new answer, Back immediately breaks down the text (title and contents) into phrases and transforms it into a numeric vector. In other words, towards our bot the answer is represented not as text, but rather as a list of numbers, which can be interpreted as the answer's "score" across different topics. For instance, you can think of the examples:

When an employee asks the Back bot on Slack, MS Teams or Google Chat a question, it is also automatically broken down into a numeric vector. All the answers in your organization are then scored based on how closely their vectors match the vector of the question.

If some of the answers are similar enough to the question, we show them as suggestions to the employee (max. 3 answers are suggested).

Such example is visualized below - in reality, each answer is evaluated and compared on as many dimensions as there are in the incoming question.

Over time, our algorithm learns from user feedback and suggests better answers.

💁🏻‍♀️ In a nutshell, the more your employees interact with the Back bot and the more feedback they give it, the better it will learn to surface the correct answers from your Knowledge Base.

💁🏻‍♀️ Write as your employees do.
Short, concise answers with a crisp, descriptive title make for the best suggestions. If you want your answer to be easily found, make sure to write them in the same kind of language that your employees would naturally use to ask a question on the topic. If your employees tend to use various words to describe the same topic (e.g. "vacation" or "holidays"), you can make them easier to find by including both possible phrasings in your answers.

If you have specific keywords that you want our algorithm to consider, and that are difficult to incorporate into the text, add them at the end of the answer.

🤖 Only add answers you're happy to suggest automatically.
If you don't want an answer to be suggested to users (for example because it includes sensitive information), consider adding it as a Saved reply instead. Those can only be used by you directly when answering the employee through a private conversation.

🤹‍♂️ Try it out yourself!
Once you add a new answer to the Knowledge Base, it is ready to be suggested within 1 minute. Try to ask the Back bot a question that you know should result in this article being suggested and give the bot some feedback to steer it in the right direction.

You can also use the Auto-answer playground, where you can try different questions to see what answers would be suggested.