A grounded AI is only as good as the documents it reads. The good news: you don't need to write a wiki. You need a handful of well-structured documents that answer the questions your customers actually ask. Here's how to write them so retrieval finds the right passage every time.
Start with the five documents
Day one, upload these: your shipping and delivery policy (with cities and timelines), your return and refund policy (with the exact window and conditions), your price list or catalogue, a plain-language FAQ of your fifteen most-asked questions, and an "about us" page with hours, location, and contact details. In our data, these five cover more than 80% of all customer queries.
Write for retrieval: one topic, one place
When a customer asks a question, the system retrieves the few passages most similar to it - so structure matters. Keep one topic per section, under a clear heading that matches how customers ask ("Do you deliver to my city?" beats "Logistics overview"). State facts explicitly and completely in each section rather than referring to "the above" - a retrieved chunk should make sense on its own.
Avoid contradictions across documents. If your return window appears in three files, it will eventually disagree in one of them, and the bot can only be as consistent as you are. Keep a single source of truth per fact.
Write each section as if it's the only thing the AI will read - because at answer time, it is.
Numbers, tables, and edge cases
Prices, timelines, and sizes should be written as text, not buried in screenshots - AI reads text, not pixels. Simple tables work well; complex merged-cell spreadsheets don't. And write down the edge cases you handle by instinct: COD limits, festival delays, damaged-item photos. If it's only in your head, the bot escalates what it could have answered.
Let the gaps teach you
You won't get it perfect on day one - and you don't need to. Every time the bot can't answer, that's logged as a knowledge gap. Check the list weekly, add the missing paragraph, and the bot learns instantly. Within a month, your knowledge base converges on what your customers actually ask, not what you guessed they would.