Build It Well
This applies whether you’re building a Gem or working with us. The scale differs; the discipline doesn’t.
Scope it narrowly
Define the audience precisely. “Students” isn’t precise. Undergraduates, graduate students, applicants, and parents all ask the same question and need different answers.
Write two lists: what it covers, and what it doesn’t. The second is harder and more useful. It’s also the thing most people skip, which is why so many chatbots confidently answer questions they should have deflected.
Write the twenty questions it must handle before building anything. Pull them from real email, tickets, or the front desk — not from what you imagine people ask. These become your test set later.
Start smaller than feels right. A chatbot that answers thirty questions well beats one that answers three hundred unreliably. You can always widen it.
Prepare your content
Content quality is the single largest driver of how good your chatbot is. Everything else on this page matters less than this section.
Inventory what you have. Where it lives, who owns it, when it was last reviewed. The Chatbot Workbook has a tab for this.
Triage each piece. Authoritative, out of date, contradicting something else, duplicated, or missing entirely.
Fix it before you load it
- Retire duplicates rather than hoping the chatbot picks the right one
- Resolve contradictions — a chatbot can’t arbitrate between two policies that disagree, it will just confidently pick one
- Date-stamp anything time-sensitive
- Make sure every piece has an owner
Write so it can be found and used
- Each section should make sense on its own, without the paragraph above it
- Use descriptive headings
- Spell out acronyms the first time
- Avoid “see above” and “click here” — there is no above, and no here
- Don’t bury answers in images, slide decks, or scanned PDFs
Formats, best to worst: structured web pages and documents, then plain text, then tables, then PDFs, then scanned PDFs and slide decks. If your key content is a scanned PDF, transcribing it is part of the job.
Decide what to do about volatile content. Deadlines, tuition figures, semester dates. Either date-stamp it, link out to the page that’s authoritative, or leave it out. Content that changes every few weeks is the most common source of wrong answers.
Less is more. A tight, curated set outperforms a large messy one — and for managed chatbots, it costs less to run.
Design the conversation
The greeting does more work than anything else you’ll write. It’s what people read before deciding what to ask. It should say what this is, what it covers, what it doesn’t, and give three things to try.
Say that it’s AI. People should know what they’re talking to.
Set the default answer length. Short answers that link out usually beat long ones that try to reproduce the whole page.
Match your unit’s voice. It’s speaking for you.
Set guardrails and escalation
Design the “I don’t know” path deliberately. A good non-answer that points somewhere useful beats a confident wrong one every time. This is a design decision, not a failure state.
Map every route out of the chatbot. The Chatbot Workbook has a tab pre-filled with the situations to cover:
- It has no confident answer
- The question is out of scope
- Someone asks about their own records — never answer these, always route
- Someone wants an exception or a decision
- Someone raises a wellbeing or mental health concern
- A safety emergency
- A report of harassment or discrimination
- Someone asks for a human
- Someone complains about the chatbot
For wellbeing and safety, confirm the destination first. Talk to the office you’re routing to before you launch and make sure they’re willing to receive it. A form nobody monitors is not an escalation path.
Design for everyone
WCAG 2.1 AA applies to anything embedded on a University site.
- It has to work by keyboard alone
- Screen readers need to announce responses as they arrive
- Contrast has to be sufficient, and text has to resize
- It has to work on a phone
Plain language is an accessibility feature. Short sentences and common words help everyone, including people using a translation tool or reading on a small screen.
Never make the chatbot the only way to get information. Anyone who can’t or won’t use it needs another route — and so does everyone else on the day it’s down. Managed chatbots stop answering if they hit their budget cap, and every chatbot is unavailable sometimes.