Articles
Articles are a collection of self-service materials that you draft inside your SalesIQ dashboard and share with customers on the chat window during a conversation. These articles will also be available for access inside the live chat window in the ' Help ' tab. You can categorize the articles and help visitors find answers to their questions. Customers can click on the category and choose a topic from the list, which further eases the difficulty of browsing through all the articles in search of one.
The Articles module in SalesIQ is now integrated with Zoho Writer to enhance the writing experience. This will allow you to use a wide range of rich formatting tools to write and edit your articles.
Note: If you are already using articles, you need to migrate them to use this feature.
Benefits
- Articles are the most expandable form of help that you can offer to visitors who visit your website. A perfectly drafted article can help a multitude of visitors at once - a herculean task for any operator in your organization.
- These articles also save visitors the trouble of navigating from one screen to another in search of help.
- Your operators can share articles during customer conversations instead of typing out the same response every time, which can be monotonous and time-consuming. This way, they can focus on more important and crucial queries. Thus, articles save a lot of time and effort.
- The more the number of articles, the more powerful your AI Bot will be. When you have a sturdy article collection, the functioning of your AI Bot becomes more effective and smooth - the bot gets trained to answer any question that comes from the visitor.
How to enable the Knowledge base in the chat window (Self-service)?
To enable self-service for your visitors and allow them to find solutions to their problems using your articles and FAQs, check out How to enable a Knowledge Base in your visitor chat window guide.
How to add a new article?
To add a new article,
- Inside the SalesIQ dashboard, navigate to Answer Hub > Articles > Compose.
- Give your article a title and click Save.
- The new editor, powered by Zoho Writer, will open, and you can start drafting your article.
AI-assisted writing
Note to customers: AI-assisted writing is a part of our upcoming Summer ’26 release and will be rolled out in phases. If you would like early access to explore the feature, please fill out this form.
Article content can be enhanced using AI, based on the configuration set in the global settings. You can generate new content, refine existing content, or correct language issues.
- Generate: Create a new article by providing inputs such as URLs, titles, or keywords. The selected AI model uses this input along with the configured global data to generate relevant article content.
- Refine: Improve or modify existing content based on your needs. This can be used to expand sections, shorten content, add context, include examples, or adjust tone and clarity.
- Correct: Automatically fix grammar, spelling, formatting, and other language-related issues in the article.
Note: For Refine and Correct, clicking the option opens an input modal. A default prompt, such as “Refine %article_content%” or “Correct %article_content%”, will be pre-filled. Do not modify this default text, simply append your instructions after it to guide the AI.
Roles and Permissions
Article configuration
Once your article is drafted completely, you can set the configuration for each article.
- Language variant: Select the language variant of the current article. Click + for adding articles in other languages.
- Departments: Associate this article with a department.
- Category: Categorize your articles to keep them organized and make it easier to find the articles you need in the self-service knowledge base. Learn more about categorizing resources here.
- To manage categories, click the gear/settings icon.
- Channels: Select the channels in which this article should be visible in the self-service knowledge base.
- Allow sharing with visitors: When enabled, this article will be displayed in the visitor chat window (if enabled).
Note to customers: Attachement & Follow up are part of our upcoming Summer ’26 release and will be rolled out in phases. If you would like early access to explore the feature, please fill out this form.
- Attachments: Add files as supporting documents for the articles (Size & limit - Maximum of 3 files, limited to 5 mb each)
- Follow up: Add existing articles/FAQs/Webpages for additional reference.
Save & Publish
- Once all of the settings are configured, click Save .
- Finally, you can either choose to save the article as a draft or publish it directly on the website.
- If you are still updating your content and don’t want to display it to customers yet, use the Save option.
- If you want to make the article available to visitors in the chat window, click Publish.
How to edit/delete an article?
Editing an article
To edit an article,
- Navigate to Answer hub > Articles.
- In the Articles dashboard, click on the article that you want to edit and then click on Edit .
- You can make changes to the contents, the associated departments, or the article's category.
- You can also click on Preview to get an idea of what the article will look like.
- Click Save as Draft / Publish .
Note: When you edit and save an existing article as a draft, the original version of that article will be displayed in the article tab of the chat window until the new version of the article is published.
Articles support in channels
Articles can be shared by operators to assist chats originating from channels as well.
- In case of chats from integrated channels like Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Telegram, LINE etc., articles can be shared in the usual manner by operators.
- The shared articles will be displayed to the visitors in the form of URL links.
- Visitors can open the link to display the shared article on a webpage.
Multi-lingual support for resources
You can create and manage article content in multiple languages to better support users across different regions. These language variants help train the bot to deliver more accurate responses based on the user’s preferred language. The translated content is also available in the chat widget (knowledge base) for visitors and can be accessed and shared by operators during conversations.
