Best Practices for Prompts | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

What You’ll Learn

In this section, you will learn:

• Best practices to consider when setting prompts
• Examples of Universal prompts

Best Practices for Prompts

In general, when you are setting prompts, you should follow these best practices:

• Don’t use any queries where you don’t have good data in the Knowledge Graph
  • Albeit obvious…don’t hardcode a query for “What open positions do you have in New York” if you don’t have a Jobs vertical.
• Always add prompts for Universal search. As a reminder, you can add these legacy style prompts through the Hardcoded Prompts feature in your Configuration UI. In the new system, you add them to universalPrompts in your JSON config editor. Set between 4-6 prompts.
  • You want to hit the sweet spot of not overwhelming the user, but also presenting them with multiple options
• Incorporate embedded Knowledge Graph prompts for each vertical
  • At a minimum, you should make sure to include [[name]] as an embedded prompt on each vertical page
• Include location specific embedded prompts for all verticals containing location data
  • For example, if you have a restaurants vertical, make sure to set up vertical prompts to guide users, such as locations in [[address.city]]
• Use embedded Knowledge Graph prompts to highlight important data points in each vertical. For example:
  • A healthcare experience may want to highlight languages spoken and conditions treated in its Providers vertical. This can be accomplished by setting a vertical prompt for [[languages]] speaking doctor who treats [[c_conditionsTreated]]
  • A FINS experience wants to highlight the product expertise of its financial agents. This can be accomplished by setting a vertical prompts for agents who specialize in [[c_productExpertise]]
• Include top Frequently Asked Questions for the business
  • This can significantly reduce call center/support resources that go towards answering menial questions, such as: “What is your routing number?” or “How do I reset my password?”
• Use these to showcase power/features of Search (ex: direct answers) and a variety of results
  • A variety that incorporates all the different search verticals will showcase a great experience
• Prompts should never be set in stone, and the business should periodically revisit and update them based on what is most relevant at the time
  • For example: Around the holidays you may want to feature holiday specific prompts or in March 2020 you would want to feature “COVID-19”
• These queries get high visibility — so make sure they are properly formatted with capitalization, questions marks, etc.. :)

Check out these examples!