Connect said it does not know
Connect checked its Knowledge, found nothing with the authority to answer, and stopped before writing anything. That is the designed behaviour rather than a fault. What makes it actionable is the record left behind, which says what was retrieved, which of it carried authority, and which verdict the gate reached — three fields that usually name the fix.
What you are looking at#
On email: a thread in Needs You with a guidance request saying approved Knowledge does not contain a confident answer, and no draft beneath it. In the activity record for that message, a Knowledge check logged as a miss. On a call: the caller was told a colleague would come back to them, and a follow-up now exists for a person to honour.
The customer has received nothing. This is worth stating plainly because the queue can look like work in progress: it is not — it is a conversation that has stopped, with the customer's own clock still running.
What it means#
Retrieval and sufficiency are separate tests, and this is the second one failing. Material may well have been found; what was missing was material carrying the standing to settle the question. For an ordinary factual question that means a verified_fact or owner_instruction source, or a typed entry in an authority-carrying category. For a commitment — price, service level, warranty, timeline, support, anything legal, a specific meeting time — the bar is higher again: a topical policy will not do.
The causes, most likely first#
| Cause | How it shows |
|---|---|
The right material carries only reference authority | Matched titles full, authoritative titles empty |
The source is parked in needs_review | The document does not appear among matched titles at all, and its own record shows warnings or a conflict |
| Scope mismatch — the intent asked for scopes the source does not serve | Nothing matched, yet the same question finds it immediately under a different scope in search |
| A commitment topic needing explicit owner authority | A critical topic is listed, and the verdict names owner authority as required |
| Wording mismatch | A low score with unrelated titles — the customer's words appear nowhere in the material |
| Genuinely nothing on the topic | A score at or near zero and no titles |
What Connect completed#
- Received the message, canonicalised it into a thread and resolved the sender to a person.
- Ran the prompt-injection shield over the external text before any model call.
- Classified the intent and chose the scopes that follow from it.
- Retrieved and scored the eligible material, and judged its authority.
- Logged the check with the score, the titles, the authoritative titles, any critical topics, the verdict and the citations.
- Asked the workspace's owner for guidance, attaching the titles that nearly matched — or, if that request could not be delivered, held an empty draft carrying the reason.
What Connect did not complete#
- No reply was drafted. Drafting happens after the gate, so there is no text waiting to be approved.
- Nothing was sent, and the customer received no acknowledgement, holding message or apology.
- No memory was written about the question, and the thread was not closed.
- On a call, no factual answer was given — a call-back commitment was made instead, and that promise is now owed.
What you can do now#
Answer the guidance request in Needs You.
Result That thread moves immediately, and the customer gets a reply written by a person or approved by one.
Turn your answer into a typed entry, with a category that carries authority and the customer's own words in it.
Result The next identical question passes the gate. This is the single highest-value habit available here — a miss answered twice is a miss that was never fixed.
Search the same question and read which titles come back and under what authority.
Result You are looking for the two-second diagnosis: right document, wrong authority; or nothing at all.
What an administrator can do#
- Clear the review queue. A source in
needs_reviewanswers nothing, and a workspace with three parked sources can feel entirely empty. - Correct authority on documents that genuinely state current policy — deliberately, reading the re-check that follows.
- Widen a source's scopes, or add
allwhere the material really is general. - Split mixed documents so the parts that state facts carry fact authority and the marketing prose does not.
- Review how often commitment topics are firing. If most misses are pricing questions, the fix is a pricing policy on file rather than a change to the gate.
When to escalate#
Escalate when the record disagrees with the workspace: authoritative titles are present and the gate still reports a miss, or the check itself is failing rather than missing — a source that has become unreadable, or an integrity failure appearing repeatedly on a file nobody is touching. Those are not content problems.
Do not escalate a first miss on a topic nobody has ever written down. That is the system doing exactly what it should, and the answer to it is one entry.
Questions#
Can I lower the threshold so answers come out more often?
The score a match must reach is configurable, and lowering it buys volume with accuracy — weak matches become confident answers. If misses are frequent, the cause is nearly always authority or scope rather than the number, and those can be fixed without spending accuracy.
Why did an identical question get answered last week?
Check whether a source has moved into needs_review since — an integrity failure or a new conflict does that without anyone acting. Also check whether the message was classified as a different intent this time, which changes the scopes retrieval was allowed to use.
Does this happen on WhatsApp and SMS too?
The gate is not a property of email. Any channel where Connect would state a business fact runs the same check, so the same miss appears with the same record behind it — and the same repair works for all of them at once.