AI-Driven Knowledge Base
An AI-Driven knowledge base can transform how your business delivers customer service.
It can could elevate your customer experience (and retention) exponentially, meaning great things for your business's bottom line.AI, machine learning and automation have come leaps and bounds over the years. Some may call it an AI revolution; others call it a customer support team's best friend. Support teams are already leveraging AI in their customer-facing self-service knowledge bases and chatbots, as well as behind the scenes internally. These AI knowledge bases provide a helping hand in providing slick, seamless customer service that can exceed customer expectations.
Read on to discover what an AI knowledge base is, the benefits and how you can leverage it to improve your customers' experience and satisfaction, and how it can empower your agents to become experts in your business.
What is an AI-powered knowledge base?
An AI-powered knowledge base is a centralised knowledge hub of your business, products and services that customers and customer service agents can utilise to answer enquiries quickly and efficiently.
The AI works by capturing the human expert knowledge from your business to help support decision-making, problem-solving and more. It quickly scours through dozens (or even hundreds) of articles and documentation using keywords, phrases and semantic search capabilities to deliver the necessary assistance.
Customers can input their queries and issues into the knowledge base to find their own solutions - meaning they don’t need to contact your business. Over 60% of consumers prefer automated self-service for simple customer service tasks, and with 81% of consumers initially attempting self-service to find solutions to their queries, you could be missing a trick if you don't already have AI-based knowledge management in place.
Self-service capabilities not only empower customers to source resolutions by themselves, but they also reduce the volume of support tickets for your agents. Internally, AI-driven knowledge bases help your customer service agents be better at their jobs. Agents have to swiftly refer to documentation when assisting customers in finding a solution with minimal friction. It can be time consuming, stressful and frustrating for both parties unless you're taking advantage of intelligent AI tools.
The benefits of an AI-knowledge base
From providing accurate content to improving agent onboarding, there are many benefits to having an AI-driven knowledge base in place.
By leaning on AI, you could see minimal hold time, faster first contact resolution (FCR), greater employee engagement, and minimal effort for your customers. It can help elevate a simple interaction into a quality customer experience, strengthen that essential emotional connection between customer and your brand, and lead to a loyal customer.
When applied strategically, AI-powered self-service can show a significant impact on various aspects of your business:
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7.2% higher YoY customer satisfaction
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7.3% higher YoY customer retention
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3.5% higher YoY first call resolution
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And even a 4.3% increase in agent productivity.
1. Accurate and relevant content
The key to a quality knowledge base is for companies to stay on top of updating the information. Curating a help centre can be challenging, especially with complex products and services, but you can lean on AI to automate the process and make it run smoother.
Over time, a vast amount of documentation and information can become stored in your base. As the business grows and scales, information will become outdated, so to make life easier, you need the correct software that can adapt accordingly. With intelligent knowledge management tools, knowledge maintenance can be supported by AI, reminding employees to check for discrepancies and regularly update with the newest information.
With self-service options, such as knowledge bases and chatbots, AI can optimise content for dynamic ranking to ensure customers see the most relevant content first. It can also suggest new content based on common search terms or customer data, pointing the experts in your business towards any knowledge gaps.
2. Streamline agent onboarding and unlock “tribal knowledge”
Training in the customer service sector can cost a lot in both time and money. With call centre leaders spending 35% of their time looking for training opportunities and only 7% of their time actually training staff, there has to be a better way. By leaning on intelligent solutions, you can stay on top of employee training, no matter how fast your business changes.
Over time, a tremendous amount of information ends up stored in a knowledge base. Eventually, some of it becomes outdated, but no one bothers to update or dispose of it. AI supports knowledge maintenance by reminding employees to update knowledge regularly. This “tribal knowledge” is integral to solving issues, and keeping a knowledge base up to date means newer agents won’t have to shadow more experienced team members - they will have all the information at their fingertips.
3. Faster service
Consumers value speedy response time, and automated self-service options can help provide faster customer service. Over 60% of consumers prefer automated self-service for simple customer service tasks. And with 31% expecting a response in an hour or less, relying on AI can certainly help you with these high consumer expectations.
Customers want knowledgeable answers and a fix to their problems, and if they can find this quickly on their own, this will instil positive brand sentiment and a better relationship between consumers and the brand. An intelligent knowledge base enables them to do just that.
4. Consistent voice and knowledge across the business
Consistent customer experiences are vital. All agents need to have the same relevant and accurate information that provides real-time, pertinent information addressing customer needs.
Avoid inconsistencies by having a centralised single source of truth about your business. Ensure all departments contribute to the upkeep of the knowledge and it’s updated regularly to ensure all agents have the same intel.
By placing all information from different, siloed teams in a centralised repository, a knowledge base makes it incredibly easy for agents to retrieve relevant, useful information. Customers no longer need to be transferred from department to department in search of someone who has the answer to their question because all agents have access to the same accurate and relevant information. And agents gain greater job satisfaction from being able to help customers solve their problems.
5. Feedback and insights into pain points
As more consumers and agents interact with your knowledge base, the AI will learn about pain points in your business. This visibility can give great insights into your business and shape proactive actions to reduce friction for the consumers.
The AI gathers feedback, interactions and recommendations from agents and customers - the more it’s used, the more it can learn about the support needs of your business.
The data can educate your team on the most commonly used content based on support requests, and empower the experts in your business to begin delivering other solutions or improvements to what impacts your customers the most.
6. Provide knowledge management metrics
It can be a challenge to see if your Knowledge base is working effectively and meeting your customer and agents’ needs. How can you know if it's genuinely delivering a brilliant customer experience?
AI makes it easier to track performance metrics like first contact resolution (FCR), average wait time and average call abandonment rate. These insights can contribute to impactful business decisions that could improve revenue and reduce pain points; a truly proactive way to deliver an excellent customer experience.
Getting started with an AI knowledge base
AI-powered knowledge bases have the potential to transform the way we do customer service. Customers stand to get more value from their interactions with your company, and as a result, they’ll have a better customer experience.
Understand your customers
You need to understand precisely who your customers are, what they need and what they want. Once you have developed customer personas with names and fleshed out personalities, you can create relevant content and self-service articles to meet their needs.
Be proactive in identifying your customers' problems
It's better to be proactive than reactive when it comes to customer service. Look into emerging or potential problems and work at providing better answers, rather than taking the risk that these issues won't escalate.
Structure content appropriately
It's crucial that agents have structured relevant information that's accessible and easy to understand in order to give excellent customer service. Ensure that you map out articles based on behaviours and user flows for your customers, with relevant headings and meaningful categories.
How to continually improve your knowledge base
Large organisations or companies that are scaling fast face knowledge sharing issues, which can affect both the customer experience and agent wellbeing.
Stay on top of your CX by implementing AI-based knowledge management, a strategic process where companies can ensure knowledge retention, efficient collaboration and quality customer service.
AI-Based knowledge management
Keep your content up-to-date! Never implement a business change without updating the system or risk a breakdown of information and communication. Inaccurate information will confuse both agents and consumers, which results in a bad experience for all.
Monitor and improve
Focus on constantly evolving and improving your AI knowledge base. Run analysis and surveys to uncover what is/isn't working - is the chatbot delivering relevant assistance? Do customers find it satisfactory? What do your customers think about your customer service?
Learn!
The more interaction the AI gets, the better! The fantastic advantage of cloud-based knowledge basis is that it will grow along with your business and get smarter with every interaction.
Interact with chatbots and systems as much as possible to train them on relevant results. Machine learning requires repeated exposure, so practice as much as possible to help it become an expert in your company.
AI can transform the world of customer service and enable your customers to get better interactions, which can have knock-on effects on your brand relationship with consumers, and in turn, your revenue. With AI-powered solutions, you can transform how your business delivers customer service. Embrace innovation and be rewarded with happier agents and customers, and better profits.
