Support Guidelines

Support Guidelines for YaleSites Beacon

Whether you’re a current or prospective Beacon owner, this guide defines the self service model

The Self-Service Partnership

YaleSites offers Beacon as a self-service feature upon approval from the Office of Public Affairs and Communication. Units that turn Beacon on for their website are responsible for creating, configuring, and maintaining all content that Beacon uses to answer questions. While the YaleSites team maintains the Beacon tool and provides documentation, units will be responsible for content quality, testing, and the accuracy of answers Beacon provides to their website visitors.

Responsibilities

Please review the table below carefully, which details the responsibilities within this self-service framework.

Area	YaleSites Team Responsibility	Your Responsibility
Applying for Beacon	Provide overview and documentation of the process to apply for Beacon	Evaluate use cases for suitability. Familiarize yourself with the process to apply for Beacon and complete all steps to get your use case approved. Ensure your content is ready for Beacon.
Content Quality	Provide documentation and guidance on creating content for Beacon. The platform indexes your published content.	Responsible for creating, maintaining, and improving the content that Beacon searches. Beacon’s answers are only as good as your content. If answers are wrong or incomplete, the fix is improving your content.
System Instructions	Provide access to system instructions configuration in the YaleSites admin. Offer guidance on effective system instructions.	You are responsible for writing and maintaining system instructions that guide Beacon’s behavior on your site. This includes tone, scope, and handling of ambiguous terms.
AI Page Metadata	Provide access to metadata fields on each page. Offer guidance on effective metadata use.	You are responsible for adding and maintaining page-level metadata that helps Beacon understand your content in context.
Testing and Quality Assurance	Provide documentation on testing and maintaining Beacon. Support quality check process during onboarding.	You are responsible for regularly testing Beacon with real questions, evaluating answer quality, and maintaining a test bank. Only you (the subject matter expert) can determine if answers are accurate for your audience.
Privacy & Data	Beacon does not store or log conversations. The platform is designed for privacy. We do not use conversation data for AI training.	You are responsible for understanding what content Beacon can access (published pages, enabled PDFs) and ensuring information behind CAS authentication is appropriately protected.
Visitor Experience	Provide the Beacon chat interface with built-in disclaimers and citation links.	You are responsible for setting appropriate expectations with your audience. Consider adding context on your site about what Beacon can and cannot do.
Platform Availability	Maintain Beacon availability. Post updates about outages or maintenance on the YaleSites website. Beacon is not a mission-critical system.	Before reporting an issue, check the YaleSites announcements page to see if it’s a known problem. Design your communications with the understanding that Beacon may experience occasional downtime.
Ongoing Maintenance	Maintain the Beacon platform and indexing infrastructure. Provide bi-weekly office hours for Beacon support.	You are responsible for ongoing testing and content updates. Plan for 15-30 minutes per week of maintenance once Beacon is live. Content changes, staff turnover, and evolving visitor needs all require attention.

Please Note

Due to the self - service nature of Beacon, our support focuses on the core platform. We provide documentation and training to enable, but our support does not extend to:

Writing or editing content
Creating system instructions or metadata
Evaluating whether your answers are accurate
Troubleshooting content - related answer quality issues

Most Beacon response issues are content issues, not platform issues. If Beacon is giving poor responses, the solution is almost always improving your content not adjusting the platform.

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