How QueAssist Answers Each Department
IT questions and HR questions need different kinds of answer. "Have you tried restarting?" is a
reasonable first reply about a frozen laptop. It is not a reasonable first reply about a payslip.
So QueAssist answers each team the way that team actually works, set with one control on the
team itself: Settings → Groups → (expand a group) → Answer mode.
1. The three answer modes
| Mode | What the employee gets | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Steps to try | 3–5 self-help steps, with "This fixed it" / "Still not working" buttons | IT — password prompts, VPN, printers, software |
| Answer from policy | A direct answer drawn from your team's own Knowledge Base articles, quoting the article it used. If no article covers the request, QueAssist says nothing and leaves it for a person | HR, Finance, Facilities, Legal — anything governed by written policy or an SOP |
| Route to a person | Only the confirmation that the request was received. No AI reply at all | A team that wants every request read by a human first |
What you get by default
You do not have to configure anything for this to be sensible:
- •Your main IT / catch-all group is set to Steps to try — exactly what QueAssist did before.
- •Every other team — HR, Finance, Facilities, and any group you add — is set to
Answer from policy.
That default is deliberately the cautious one. A team with no articles written yet answers
nothing and routes to a person, rather than guessing.
2. "Answer from policy" in practice
This mode has one rule: QueAssist may only tell an employee what your own articles say.
- •It reads your team's articles plus your workspace-wide articles — never another
department's. IT's password-reset runbook cannot be used to answer an HR question about a
password-protected payslip.
- •It quotes the article it used, by title, in the reply. The employee can see where the
answer came from, and so can your agents.
- •It is forbidden from inventing an amount, a date, an entitlement or an approver that is
not written in the article. No made-up notice periods, no invented expense limits.
- •If nothing in your articles genuinely covers the request, it does not answer. It posts an
internal note on the ticket saying so, and the request waits for a person.
That last point is the important one. A silent, honest hand-off to a human is better than a
confident wrong answer sent under your HR team's own email address.
Sensitive requests are never auto-answered
QueAssist's triage already flags requests that need human judgement — payroll and salary,
leave and termination, anything legal, security or harassment related, and anything that needs
an approval. In Answer from policy mode those are handed straight to a person, with the
reason recorded on the ticket, even if you have an article that looks like a match.
3. Setting it up for a department
1. Write the articles. Settings → Knowledge Base → New article. Put the real policy in
the body — the entitlement, the process, the deadline, who approves.
2. Set "Owned by" to the department. The picker is on the article editor. This is what
scopes the article to that team when QueAssist answers. Leave it as Workspace-wide for
anything that applies to everyone (the holiday calendar, the office address).
3. Publish it. Drafts are never used to answer anyone.
4. Check the answer mode. Settings → Groups → expand the team → Answer mode. It should
already be on Answer from policy.
Three or four good articles per department is enough to start. Add more as the same questions
come in.
"Owned by" is not a privacy setting. It controls which team's answers an article can
ground. Employees searching the Knowledge Base in the portal still see every published
article, exactly as before. Do not put anything confidential in an article.
4. Why a department stopped getting AI replies
If a team was getting automatic replies and now is not, it will be one of these — and each one
is written on the ticket as an internal note your agents can read:
| Note says | What to do |
|---|---|
| No article covers this request | Write the article, or answer it once by hand and turn that reply into an article |
| Triage flagged this as needing human judgement | Nothing — this is working as intended for payroll, leave, legal and approvals |
| This team routes requests straight to a person | Change Answer mode if you want AI replies for this team |
5. What this does not change
- •IT is untouched. Your main group keeps the same steps, the same "This fixed it" buttons and
the same learned patterns.
- •Routing is unchanged. Department mailboxes (Department Mailboxes),
portal department cards (Departments on the Employee Portal) and
assignment rules all decide who gets a ticket exactly as before. Answer mode only decides how
QueAssist may reply.
- •Your AI quota works the same way. A request QueAssist declines to answer does not spend an
AI action on a reply.
- •Answer mode follows the ticket. If an agent moves a ticket from IT to HR, HR's answer mode
and HR's articles apply from then on.
Next: Knowledge Base · Agentic Auto-Resolution · Identity Scoping & Safety