Training Your Chatbot: What to Upload and How to Structure It

A BotPlatform chatbot is only as good as the content you give it. The AI doesn't have background knowledge about your business — it works entirely from the documents you upload. Get the knowledge base right, and the chatbot is accurate, helpful, and genuinely useful. Get it wrong, and the bot will either give vague answers or, worse, confidently say the wrong thing.

Here's a practical guide to what belongs in your knowledge base, what doesn't, and how to structure it for the best results.

The Best Document Types to Upload

FAQ documents are the single most valuable thing you can upload. A well-written FAQ that covers your top 20–30 questions will power the majority of your chatbot's conversations. If you don't have one, write one — it's worth the hour it takes.

Service lists and pricing guides let your chatbot answer "what do you offer?" and "how much does it cost?" These are among the most common questions any business receives. A clearly formatted services document — even a simple list with descriptions and prices — dramatically improves chatbot quality.

Policy documents — returns, refunds, shipping, cancellation, warranties — are particularly valuable because these are questions customers need accurate answers to. Uploading your actual policy document ensures the chatbot gives the right answer every time, rather than approximating.

Product catalogues work especially well when they include descriptive text. If your catalogue has product names, descriptions, key specifications, and prices, the chatbot can answer "do you have X in Y?" and "what's the difference between A and B?" directly.

Process guides and how-to documents help with procedural questions. How do I place an order? How do I make a warranty claim? What's the process for a custom quote? If your business has documented processes, they're worth uploading.

What NOT to Upload

Some documents should stay out of your knowledge base entirely:

Internal HR documents — employment contracts, staff policies, salary information. These are confidential and not relevant to customer enquiries.

Detailed financial records — invoices, contracts with specific pricing for individual clients, supplier agreements. Even if sensitive data is unlikely to appear in a customer conversation, there's no reason to put it in the knowledge base.

Documents with personal information — anything containing names, addresses, or contact details of individual customers or employees.

Highly technical internal documentation — warehouse procedures, internal workflows, back-end system guides. These confuse the AI and aren't useful to customers.

The principle is simple: your knowledge base should contain only the information you'd be comfortable sharing with any customer. Think of it as a thorough, well-organised version of your public-facing content.

How to Structure Your Documents for Best Results

The AI uses the structure of your documents to understand context. Well-structured documents produce better answers.

Use clear headings. Documents with H1, H2, and H3 headings (or their equivalent in Word/PDF formatting) are much easier for the AI to navigate. A wall of unbroken text is harder to extract specific answers from.

Be explicit, not assumed. "Standard delivery takes 3–5 business days to metro areas; allow 5–7 business days for regional locations" is far more useful than "delivery times vary." The AI can only work with what's written.

Avoid acronyms without definition. Internal shorthand that your team understands may confuse the AI. Define acronyms on first use.

Keep formatting clean. Avoid complex tables in PDFs if possible — plain text with clear labels works better. If you're using Word, use proper bullet lists and headings rather than indented text or custom formatting.

How Often to Update Your Knowledge Base

Your knowledge base should reflect your current business. When prices change, update the pricing document. When a policy changes, upload the new version. A chatbot giving customers outdated information is worse than no chatbot at all.

A practical approach: make it part of your workflow to update the knowledge base whenever you update a document on your website. If your website's FAQ page gets updated, your knowledge base FAQ document should too.

Product Catalogue Sync vs. Manual Documents

If you run a WooCommerce or Shopify store, BotPlatform can sync your product catalogue directly — you don't need to manually maintain a product document. The sync pulls live product names, descriptions, prices, and stock status on a schedule you define.

Manual documents are best for content that doesn't change frequently: your FAQs, policies, service descriptions, guides. For content that changes regularly — especially product inventory — a live sync is more reliable than a manually updated document.

The businesses that get the most out of their BotPlatform chatbot are the ones that treat the knowledge base as a living document — updated regularly, structured clearly, and focused entirely on what customers actually need to know.