Sprout Concierge (Serge) Simplified: Best Practices You Need to Know

Sprout Concierge, or Serge, is a generative AI chatbot that helps employees with questions about your company’s internal documents, like the employee handbook, company policies, and training materials. Think of him as a specialized version of ChatGPT, designed to assist with your organization’s rules and procedures.

Training a chatbot involves more than just uploading files; it requires human input for managing, organizing, and testing the content. This article offers best practices for organizing files to ensure the Sprout Concierge chatbot provides accurate responses. Users are free to customize their content, but for more accurate answers, here are some recommendations:

Best Practices

• Name your documents properly.
  • Example:
    • Before: emp_handbk.pdf
    • After: Employee Handbook.pdf
• Think like you’re crafting a reviewer for a student when creating a document.
• Include relevant information only.
  • Note: Any type of text formatting is valid, as long as it’s readable.
• Remove redundant and unnecessary labels or statements (e.g. headers, footers, words with no context).
• Remove images as these will be disregarded.
• If important information is in image format, convert it to text.
• If text contains links, spell out the URLs.

Example:

• Convert information such as FAQs or textual data with descriptions into tables.
  • Note: For each table, always add headers that are descriptive and well represent the data.
• Limit tables to 10 columns max, not exceeding a single page.
  • No table overlaps (e.g. same table extended to next page)
  • No merged cells for table headers and rows

Example:

• Limit each paragraph to 500 characters max (with highlights as bullets).

Example:

Option 1: 500 characters max per paragraph

Option 2: Bulleted form

• When working with presentation slides, group content with the same topic into a single text box.

Criteria

Zendesk URLs

Tip: Make sure to specify the following when entering your Zendesk help center URL: 

• The subdomain name you chose when you set up your account, followed by zendesk.com/hc 
  • Example: 
    • mycompany.zendesk.com/hc
• The main language based on the locale code in the URL 
  • Example: 
    • “.../hc/en-us”

Note: All articles from a given Zendesk website will be retrieved. If you need to import a specific Zendesk article, add knowledge via the website URL instead.

Files

• Files should be in PDF, DOCX, PPTX, or HTML format.
  • Note: Old versions of DOC or PPT will not work. Please convert them to DOCX or PPTX.
• Files should not be password-protected.
• File content should be typewritten (editable text that can be copied and pasted, not scanned).
  • Note: Images will be disregarded.
• Max file size for each batch upload should be 50 MB.

Website URLs

Tip: Enter any of the following URL types:

• Document URL (PDF, DOCX, PPTX)
  • Example:
    • https://example.com/file.pdf
• Website URL
  • Example:
    • https://example.com/page
• Public Google Drive URL (PDF, Docs, Slides)
  • Example:
    • https://docs.google.com/document/d/abc123

Note: Images will be disregarded.

Limitations

Note: The whole website will not be imported. Only individual web pages will be retrieved.

Here are the website URLs not supported:

Website URLs not supported	Example
Document URL (DOC, PPT)	https://example.com/file.doc
Media URL (e.g. JPG, GIF, MP4, YouTube)	https://example.com/image.jpg https://youtube.com/watch?v=abc123
Google Drive folders	https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/abc123
Google Drive formats that are not Docs, Slides, or PDF	https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/abc123
Private links that need login	Google Docs file that has restricted access

If a URL is not supported, please let us know by submitting your feedback.