Better article context for Fin

Hi ​@Jay Reddy ! 

Do I understand correctly that your goal is to effectively nest Content and Sources Guidance under the articles themselves for easier maintenance? 

Hi ​@Aleksei O - yes, exactly. We’ve noticed that many of the “errors” are less about Fin providing incorrect information and more about a lack of contextual understanding. I think this largely comes from the way our articles are written from the perspective of the customer/contributor reading them.

For example, Fin sometimes doesn’t distinguish between an article intended for an existing customer versus one intended for a newly registered customer, even when the articles are clearly located within sections like “Getting Started” or “Account Maintenance” and explicitly reference new vs long-standing customers. While the content may be similar, the actions required can differ significantly.

From a Content and Source Guidance perspective, it would be far more convenient if we could define that context directly within the production of the article itself, rather than managing it separately through snippets and guidance layers.

This is just one example that could potentially be solved through customer start-date logic and audience segmentation. However, we don’t necessarily know when a customer transitions from “new” to “established,” since usage patterns vary by feature. Solving that through snippets alone would likely require much deeper backend connectivity and significantly more data sharing/context management.

The type of enhancement I’m thinking of is similar to how Intercom/Fin is developing AI Attributes — where values have internal descriptions explaining when they should appropriately apply, without exposing that information to end users.

So, when creating Help Centre content, it would be incredibly useful to have an additional internal-only section (perhaps another tab alongside “Data” in the right-hand pane) where teams could define contextual instructions, intended scenarios, operational nuances, and guidance directly against the article itself.
Ideally, id possible, anything entered there could auto sync to the existing guidance section, allowing for conflict detection or optimisation checks etc.

Hi ​@Jay Reddy, Seán here from the Fin technical support team 👋

You’re both right, this is currently a product limitation on article specific Guidance but ​@Aleksei O has the exact solution for targeting different types of Users. That said, we always love hearing what our customers want, and the best place to share feedback like this is our Community Product Wishlist. I'd recommend searching there first to see if a similar request already exists, and if it does you can upvote it or add your comments. If not, you can create a new one here: Product Wishlist.

Hi ​@Aleksei O - thanks for the greater insights and suggestion - we do use audience segmentation quite heavily as we’ve nine different LoBs/Brands in the same workspace - and due to the nature of the businesses, in some cases we have three different audiences for some of the brands, split into ‘non customer / lead’, customer and contributor - this allows us to split the HC content out to the correct cohort, however, the nuance differences seem to get lost on Fin. During the academy training for Fin last month, I posed the same question and it was advised Fin will get confused when there is a lot of guidance - and even when we calibrate and consolidate to prevent duplication and/or conflicts the larger the volume of guidance, the less effective it becomes. It we could add this within the article it could give Fin greater context on if the article is the right resources to use, preventing it from getting confused or overloaded. With the volume of Brands we have we hit the 100 limit event though some only have three or four pieces of guidance, with others up to 12. Thanks again, it’s good to hear there are some extra things we can try.

Thanks ​@Sean Meade Forum Support Lead - I’ll take a look at the wish list to see if it’s there.