Triage Questions & Teach Your Bot Better Answers

Your chatbot is only as good as the questions you let it learn from. Every real conversation tells you what visitors actually want, where your knowledge brain has holes, and which answers are landing flat. Alee's question-triage inbox turns that stream of messages into a short, manageable worklist so you can mark what matters, spot gaps, and feed better answers back into the brain. This guide walks through the whole loop.

Why triage matters

When a visitor asks something, Alee embeds the question, retrieves the closest chunks from your knowledge brain, and an LLM writes a grounded answer with sources. If the answer is not in your content, the bot honestly says it does not know. That honesty is a feature — but it is also a to-do list: every "I don't have that information" is a question you could have answered if the right content were in the brain.

Triage is the habit of reading those signals on a schedule instead of letting them pile up. Done weekly, it closes gaps so fewer visitors hit a dead end, sharpens answers that were grounded but vague, and surfaces demand — the questions people keep asking are the topics worth a dedicated page, a new FAQ, or even a product decision.

Where the triage inbox lives

Open the bot you want to work on and go to its analytics area. Alongside the conversation, message, lead, and lead-rate counts, you will find two closely linked views:

• A Top Questions list that ranks what people ask most, so you see demand at a glance.
• A question-triage inbox where individual questions can be marked, sorted, and acted on. This is where you mark a question important, FAQ, or answered, and where you teach a better answer.

The Top Questions list is read-only ranking; the inbox — the view that lets you label individual questions and write a corrected answer — is where you do the work.

The three labels and what each one means

The inbox is built around marking each question with a status so nothing slips through. The three core labels are:

• Important — flag this when a question is high-value: a buying or booking intent, a pricing query, a question that hints at a lead, or anything you want to keep an eye on. Marking important pulls a question to the top of your worklist. Use it sparingly so "important" stays meaningful.
• FAQ — mark a question as FAQ when it comes up often and deserves a clean, canonical answer that you stand behind. FAQ-marked questions are your candidates for a polished answer, a suggested starter chip, or a pasted FAQ source. Think of this label as "this is a question we will be asked again and again."
• Answered — mark a question answered once you have handled it: either the bot's reply was already good, or you have taught a better answer and added any missing content. This is your "done" state. Clearing handled questions to Answered keeps the inbox short and honest, so the only things left are the ones that still need you.

A healthy rhythm: skim new questions, flag the high-value ones Important, promote the recurring ones to FAQ, fix what needs fixing, then mark everything you handled Answered. Next week, you only look at what is new.

Spotting gaps: what to look for

Open the inbox (and the Top Questions list next to it) and read with these patterns in mind. Each one points to a specific fix.

1. Flat "I don't know" answers. The clearest gap. The visitor asked something reasonable and the brain had nothing. Note the topic — you will add a source for it.
2. Vague but grounded answers. The bot answered from your content, but the answer is thin because the content is thin. The fix is better source material, not a new source.
3. Repeating questions. The same question (or close variants) high on Top Questions means real demand. These deserve FAQ status and often a dedicated answer.
4. Wrong-but-confident answers. Rare with grounded retrieval, but if the bot pulled from a stale or contradictory chunk, remove or correct the source.
5. Lead-shaped questions. "Can I book a call?", "Do you have a plan for agencies?", "Do you ship to my city?" — mark these Important. You want the bot to convert them, not just answer.
6. Off-scope questions. Things your business does not cover. Let the bot stay honest and decline — no fix needed, just mark Answered.

Feeding the fix back into the brain

This is the heart of the loop. Once triage tells you what is wrong, here is how to teach a better answer.

1. Teach a corrected answer directly

When the inbox lets you write or attach a better answer to a question, do it. You are giving the bot the exact, approved response for that question and its near-variants — ideal for a recurring question with one right answer, like pricing in INR, your refund window, or your booking link. Because Alee serves repeat or similar questions from a cache, a taught answer pays off every time that question comes back.

2. Add or improve the underlying source

A taught answer fixes one question; better source content fixes a whole topic. Depending on the gap:

• Paste a raw text / FAQ block with the missing answer. Fastest fix for a single fact or policy.
• Crawl a website URL if the answer already lives on a page the bot has not learned yet.
• Add a sitemap or many pages at once when the gap spans a whole section of your site.
• Upload a PDF or document for detailed material — a brochure, price list, or policy doc.
• Add a YouTube video so the brain learns from the transcript of a talk or demo.

Re-crawl or add sources any time; the brain grows, and new chunks are immediately available for retrieval. See tutorials for the paste-text workflow and more guides for the other source types.

3. Promote a question to a suggested starter chip

If a question is both common and a good entry point, add it to your bot's suggested starter questions. The next visitor does not even have to type it — they tap it, get your clean taught answer, and the conversation starts on your terms.

4. Tune the bot persona

Some "bad answers" are not gaps at all — they are tone or behavior issues. If the bot answers correctly but does not ask for a name and email on a booking question, fix the bot persona / system prompt rather than the content. For example, tell it to share your booking link and ask for contact details whenever someone shows buying intent.

A worked example

Say you run a coaching business and trained Alee on your website plus a pricing PDF. After a week, you open the triage inbox and see:

• "Do you have EMI or UPI payment options?" — asked four times, every answer was "I don't have that information."
• "Can I book a free discovery call?" — asked twice.
• "What's your refund policy?" — answered, but vaguely.

The triage pass:

1. Mark the EMI/UPI question Important (it is blocking buyers) and FAQ (it recurs). Paste a short text source covering your payment options, teach that exact answer to the question, and mark it Answered.
2. Mark the discovery-call question Important. Add your booking link to a pasted FAQ and update the bot persona to ask for the visitor's name and phone when someone wants a call. Mark Answered.
3. The vague refund answer is covered but thin. Upload your full refund-policy doc, re-check the answer, and mark Answered.
4. Promote "Can I book a free discovery call?" to a suggested starter chip so the next visitor taps straight into your lead flow.

Four questions, four fixes, and the brain is measurably better — all from reading one week of real conversations.

Make it a routine

Triage works because it is small and regular. A practical cadence:

• Weekly (10 minutes): skim new questions, flag Important, promote recurring ones to FAQ, clear handled ones to Answered.
• Monthly: review Top Questions over the longer window. Anything that keeps climbing deserves a dedicated page or a refreshed source. Retire chips that never get tapped and add the questions people actually ask.
• After any big change — new pricing, a new offer, a new INR billing option — re-crawl the relevant sources and triage the questions that follow.

The free plan (1 bot, 200 messages a month) is enough to start this habit; as volume grows, pricing scales with you. The more conversations you triage, the smarter your bot gets. For the full picture of the analytics and inbox, see features.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between marking a question Important and FAQ?

Important flags a high-value question you want to act on or watch — usually a lead, pricing, or booking intent — and pulls it to the top of your worklist. FAQ marks a recurring question that deserves a clean, canonical answer you can reuse as a taught reply or a suggested chip. A question can be both.

How do I fix a question the bot answered with "I don't have that information"?

That answer means the topic is not in your knowledge brain yet. Add the missing content — paste a text or FAQ block, crawl the relevant page, add a sitemap, upload a PDF, or add a YouTube video — then re-check the answer. For a single recurring question, you can also teach the corrected answer directly in the inbox.

Will teaching a better answer slow my bot down?

No. Taught answers and the underlying sources are part of the same retrieval and caching system, so repeat or similar questions are served instantly from cache. Teaching better answers makes the bot more accurate without adding any lag for visitors.

Ready to turn real conversations into a smarter bot? [Start free](/signup) with Alee and run your first triage pass this week.