Write assistant guides
The Service Hub assistant answers a requester’s question from guides an admin writes, nothing else. This page is about writing one that the assistant can actually use, and the two audiences a guide can carry. For the switch and the outcomes it is measured by, read Service Hub first.
What to write
A guide is a title and a body, plain text. Write it the way you would answer the question yourself: the VPN’s name and where to find the client, who approves a laptop request over a certain price, what is down right now and what to do instead, the standing rule a policy document buries on page twelve. Keep one guide to one topic; a requester’s question pulls in the guides that best match it, and a guide that tries to cover five topics matches none of them well.
Requester versus desk audience
Every guide carries an audience, set when you write it.
- Requester. The assistant may use this guide when it answers a requester directly, before anything is handed to the service desk. Write the plain-language version here: what a non-technical person needs to do or know.
- Desk. The assistant may use this guide only once a conversation reaches the service desk, for example when it opens a catalog item prefilled for someone on the team to pick up. Write the operational version here: an internal escalation path, a team’s on-call rotation, a step a requester should never be told to do themselves.
The same fact can need both: a requester guide that says “reset your password at the portal”, and a desk guide that says which team to escalate to when the reset itself fails.
What the assistant will and will not say
The assistant answers from three things only: your guides, the catalog, and the house rules (the tenant note). It will not say anything it was not given here, in the catalog, or in a house rule, and it will not guess at a policy you have not written down. When nothing it can read answers the question, it says so and offers to open the right catalog item instead of inventing an answer.
Guides, like every document in memory, go through the privacy shield before anything reaches a model provider; see Privacy and masking for what that covers for your tenant’s masking tier.
The “From” chip
When the assistant’s answer rests on a guide, its reply carries a From chip naming that guide. Clicking it opens the guide’s own text, so a requester (or you, reviewing a conversation) can see exactly what the assistant was working from rather than taking the answer on faith.
Managing guides
Guides live on the Assistant tab of Service Hub Admin (/admin/service-hub/assistant), alongside the on/off switch and the last 30 days of outcomes. Retiring a guide removes it from the assistant’s reading immediately; retiring is not deleting, so a retired guide can be restored later with its text intact.
How it connects
- The switch and the outcomes this guide feeds are covered in Service Hub.
- What a model provider is allowed to see about a conversation is covered in Privacy and masking.