🔗 Knowledge Sources

Knowledge Sources are designed to empower your customer service with instant access to a wealth of information, ensuring that the answers your customers seek are always at their fingertips. By harnessing Knowledge Sources, you're not just offering support; you're providing smart, tailored, and efficient assistance that elevates your customer's experience. In this article, you'll learn how Knowledge Sources works, how to add new sources to your system, and the benefits it brings to your customer support operations.

Understanding Knowledge Sources

The core idea behind Knowledge Sources is simple yet powerful. It's about giving your end-users the information they're searching for by leveraging your existing knowledge base. When a customer asks a question, Knowledge Sources searches through your connected information repositories to find relevant content. Then, it utilizes a large language model (LLM) to generate a precise and helpful answer.

Adding New Sources

You can leverage Knowledge Sources by adding new content repositories directly from the Siena platform. Navigate to Automations → Knowledge Sources in the left-hand menu to get started.

NOTE: After you integrate your Shopify account, the Shopify Product Catalogue will be visible to connect as a Knowledge Source as well.

We support a variety of sources, including:

• Shopify (Catalogue, Pages)
• Zendesk Articles
• Yotpo Q&A
• Google Docs
• Google Sheets
• PDF
• TXT
• Websites (full website, single page)

For a source to be added, it must be valid and accessible. This includes ensuring proper integration, URL, and document accessibility. After adding a new source, the system will begin extracting content and preparing it for information retrieval. This process may take a few minutes to complete, with website sources requiring additional time due to the need for crawling.

To keep your information up-to-date, sources (with the exception of PDF and TXT files) are automatically synced every seven days. However, you have the option to manually force a sync per source if needed. It's also possible to disable a source or specific elements within a source. Disabled sources won't be automatically synced or used during information retrieval.

When setting up Knowledge Sources for the first time, always ensure that you go to the Knowledge Source settings after adding the source. Then, select the channels for which you want Siena to use the data sources.

How It Works

Knowledge Sources are designed to be an extension to your automation library to answer customer queries ensuring more coverage and potentially higher automation rate. It also works both in the Playground and in the inbox AI assistant.

This feature is very powerful, however, it's important to note a few limitations:

• Image content and image-based PDFs are unsupported.
• Siena Vision integration is not available with Knowledge Sources.
• The website crawler prioritizes the first 1000 pages using a Depth First Search approach.
• Text is preprocessed for simplicity, with exceptions made for website content to ensure relevance.

Think of our system as a super smart search engine. First, it takes all the information from various sources and breaks it down into smaller, manageable pieces, like individual search results.

Each of these pieces is then given a unique digital fingerprint and stored in a special database. When you ask a question, the system creates a new digital fingerprint for your query.

Then, it uses advanced algorithms, similar to how a search engine might find relevant results, by comparing your question's digital fingerprint to the ones in the database. It identifies the most relevant pieces of information, much like a search engine would pull out the most relevant results for your query.

Once it has gathered all the relevant information, it puts it together in a way that makes sense and answers your question. This is like the search engine presenting you with the most relevant and concise information to answer your query.

How to Expand Your Siena Strategy and Go Beyond Customer Support with Knowledge Sources

Knowledge Sources is not just a tool for enhancing customer support; it's a versatile feature that can significantly broaden the scope of your Siena strategy. By leveraging Knowledge Sources, you can transition from traditional support to providing AI-driven concierge experiences that offer personalized interaction at every customer touchpoint. This section explores innovative ways to utilize Knowledge Sources, transforming your approach to customer engagement and service.

Personalized Recommendations

Imagine a shopping experience where every customer feels understood and valued. With Knowledge Sources, you can analyze customer queries and preferences to offer personalized product recommendations. This not only enhances the shopping experience but also increases the likelihood of purchases by showcasing items that genuinely resonate with the customer's tastes and needs.

Relationship Building with New Customers

First impressions matter, and Knowledge Sources can help you make a lasting one. For new customers, it can offer tailored engagements, introductory offers, and guidance on how to make the best out of their shopping experience. This initial interaction sets the tone for a positive relationship, encouraging customer loyalty from the outset.

Leveraging Knowledge for Marketing and Sales

Beyond direct customer interactions, Knowledge Sources can play a pivotal role in informing your marketing and sales strategies. By analyzing the types of questions and concerns customers have, you can identify trends and preferences that can shape your marketing campaigns, product development, and sales approaches. This insight allows for more targeted and effective strategies, driving growth and customer engagement.

Knowledge Sources represents a leap forward in AI-driven customer support, offering a seamless way to deliver accurate, relevant information directly to your customers. By integrating diverse information repositories and leveraging cutting-edge AI, you're not only improving response times but also enhancing the overall quality of your support.

Remember, while Knowledge Sources streamlines information retrieval, it's crucial to continuously update and maintain your internal knowledge base and your Siena Automation Library to ensure the best possible customer experience.

Shopify Metafields in Knowledge Sources

Metafields in Shopify give you the power to store and display custom information on products, collections, customers, and more. In Siena, all available Shopify metafields and metaobjects are included in Knowledge Sources by default.

To get started, select "Refresh" in the top right your Shopify Product Pages

Automations > Knowledge Sources > Shopify Product Pages

You have access to a more complete set of contextual data for your products, improving the accuracy and richness of responses, especially in scenarios where product attributes or detailed information vary widely between items.

Siena automatically:

• Ingests all metafields and metaobjects across relevant resource types (Products, Variants, Collections, Customers, etc.). Note: orders are not supported as of yet.

• Makes them searchable and referenceable by the AI during conversations.

• Ensures metafields are treated as first-class knowledge—just like titles, descriptions, and tags.

This works without any manual configuration required on your part.

Use Case Example

Let’s say your store uses a metafield like custom.fabrics.blend to indicate the material composition of each product. With this update:

• The AI can now surface responses like “This shirt is 65% cotton and 35% polyester” directly from that metafield.

• Answers remain accurate and specific, even when information isn't available in the product description or title.

Best Practices

To get the most out of this improvement:

• Review your existing metafield setup in Shopify and ensure fields are consistently named and populated.

• Avoid storing critical data only in unstructured or inconsistent fields.

• Test your AI answers using products that rely heavily on metafield data for accuracy.

See the Shopify Integration page to ensure that the Shopify-Siena integration has been setup properly for all features to operate as expected. 

Have any questions regarding the Knowledge Sources? Please feel free to br owse our FAQ page here.