Self-Service Customer Support: How to Set It Up With an AI Chat
Self-service customer support means customers find the answer themselves, at any hour, without opening a ticket. Most teams already have the material: a help center, documentation, policy pages. What is usually missing is a way for a customer to ask in their own words and get the right passage in plain language. An AI chat built on your own pages does that, and it can show you which questions your pages still cannot answer. Here is how to set it up in five steps.
Step 1: Decide which questions customers should solve alone
Look at your last month of support emails and chats and list the questions that have a clear, stable answer: how to reset a password, where to find an invoice, what the return window is, how a feature works. Those are the ones to hand to self-service. Questions that need a person's judgment, such as a billing dispute or a damaged order, stay with your team. Writing this split down keeps the chat focused and tells you later what success looks like.
Step 2: Put the answers in pages the chat can read
The chat can only answer from what it can read. Make sure each question on your list has a clear answer on a public page, in a document or in plain text. Add your help center as a website source and limit it to the paths that matter, such as /docs/ or /help/. You can add PDF, Word or Markdown files too. OneType searches by meaning and by keywords at once, so everyday wording and exact error codes both find the right article. Pages behind a login cannot be read. Each answer is written in a few sentences from the best passages and carries a numbered source with the page title and a link, so the customer can open the article.
Step 3: Pick a layout for help and docs
The same chat can sit on your site in several layouts, and three are made for help and docs. The help page is a full page chat with up to eight categories of example questions. The search palette is a centered dialog for quick questions. The docs sidebar is a drawer next to your content, which can push the page aside or sit over it. Pick one of the chat templates, add your logo and greeting, and add the chat to your site with one script tag. Within about a minute of opening a page, OneType shows "Live on" followed by your site's address, for example "Live on help.example.com".
Step 4: Keep a person one click away
Self-service works best when customers know a person is still there. Decide what the chat does when your pages have no answer: it can hand the chat to your team, show a contact form, or apologize. Handing it to your team needs a paid plan and is turned on by you. Then a visitor can ask for a person in their own words or with the button in the chat, and your team gets a short summary of what they want, what was tried and why it was not enough. Outside your opening hours, or when nobody is online, the visitor gets a contact form instead. For answers that must never vary, such as refund rules, write a saved answer.
Step 5: Read what customers could not find
After a week, open the unanswered questions. The chat collects the questions it could not answer and the answers visitors rated as not answering, wrong or outdated, and groups them by meaning, with a count and the most asked first. That list is your writing list: each group is one article or one saved answer away from covered. Click Answer, write it once, and it is live from the next conversation. If a question is off-topic, dismiss it. Review the list weekly and the share of questions customers solve alone grows with it.
Let customers find the answer themselves
See how it works for help centers: AI help center and docs search, or start free.