The website, read whole
The business's site is read in full when the agent is deployed, and re-read on a schedule afterwards. A price change on the site changes what the agent says, with nobody told to update anything.
Knowledge base
One set of facts, every channel.
An answering service knows what is on its script sheet. The sheet was printed in March. The business has changed its hours, its prices and its service area since, and the phone is still saying March.
What the agent knows
The website, the documents and the notes, kept current without anyone retyping them.
The Knowledge base card on the agent's board holds everything the agent is allowed to say. It is one place, and every channel reads it.
Documents
PDF, Word and plain text, uploaded and indexed in a minute or two. A scanned PDF has no text in it, so it needs typing up before the agent can read it.
Notes
The things that are not on the website. How to handle a particular request, which work the business does not take, what to say when a site is closed for the day.
Every channel
The phone, text, website chat and email agents all answer from the same knowledge. One edit, and every channel changes together.
What it will not say
It will not guess. A question the knowledge base does not cover gets “let me have somebody call you back”, not an invention. Asked whether it is an AI, it says so. Asked who built it, it says Talkgate.
Live answers from connected systems
“What do I owe” and “when am I booked in” are not knowledge base questions. They come from the client's accounting, diary or job system through an integration, live, on the call.
How it goes for the caller
Where each answer comes from.
- The caller asks something that is on the website. Opening hours, service area, what the business does. The answer comes from the crawl, as current as the last scheduled re-read.
- The caller asks something that is in a document. Warranty terms, the price list, the cancellation policy. The answer comes from the uploaded file.
- The caller asks about themselves. Their balance, their next appointment, their job. The answer comes from the connected system, not from anything stored in the knowledge base.
- The caller asks something nothing covers. The agent does not guess. It takes details for a call-back, or puts the caller through to a person.
- The business changes its website. The next scheduled re-read picks it up, and the phone, chat, text and email agents all say the new thing.
What the business gets
An agent that stays right without a maintenance habit.
The usual failure of an answering service is drift. This is built so the facts cannot drift away from the business.
- One edit changes every channel: phone, text, website chat and email.
- The website is re-read on a schedule, so the site stays the source of truth it already is.
- Documents indexed in a minute or two, with no waiting on anyone.
- Unlimited changes, no hardware and nothing to install.
- A “How it works” map showing where every piece of information goes and how long it is kept. See call records.
- The knowledge base and every call handled in New Zealand and Australian data centres, and nowhere else. See security.
Sold through partners
The part of onboarding your team already knows how to do
Setting up a client's knowledge base is the work of a conversation: their website address, the few documents they already hand to new staff, and the notes that live in the operations manager's head. The builder asks for the website at setup and reads it whole, so most of the knowledge base arrives on its own. Sold through partners: you set the price, Talkgate runs the platform. The knowledge base is the foundation under every agent and channel on this site, and the reason the phone, website chat and email agents can be sold as one product. See the partner programme.
Sources
What the knowledge base reads.
- The client's website
- Word
- Plain text
- Notes
Answers about a particular customer come from the connected system instead. See all integrations.
Next step
Bring a client's website and watch an agent learn it.
A partner briefing shows the knowledge base being built from a real site, and what the agent says when it does not know.