3 Ways AI-powered Knowledge Base Enables Faster & Accurate Resolution

We now have intelligent and smart assistants in our homes, and driverless vehicles and the list is too long. Some experts predict that the AI revolution will be on the scale of the industrial revolution. This implies that AI will revolutionize and transform our lives and shape the future.

So, how do all these scenarios relate to AI-powered knowledge bases? And how does it relate to customer service? 

Customer service is one area of business where AI and automation are making a remarkable impact. At the core, it’s about serving customers and meeting their needs and expectations. It’s sometimes about exceeding these expectations by being proactive. Customer service involves agents as the key players in delivering communication to customers. But this doesn’t mean technology doesn’t play a huge role in this space.

Using AI can help you make empowered agents, and one way it does this is through AI knowledge bases.

What is an AI-Powered Knowledge Base?

Any knowledge base the business uses which is backed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an AI-Powered Knowledge Base. In customer service jobs, agents often have to quickly search through relevant information to find a solution to the customer’s problem.

Most of the time, this can be time-consuming and ineffective. Customers can become frustrated if they think the representative they’re talking to is not knowledgeable or incompetent.

In contrast, an AI knowledge base can quickly search through all the documentation by using semantic search capability and deliver required information straight to the agent.

Another area that this system helps is in unifying information. This allows a single repository that can be accessed by all agents. This way consistent information will pass on to the customer on every channel, as well as the information from all teams, can be unified so that key information is easy to retrieve.

This means that an agent will never have to put a customer on hold and say, “I’ll just check with my colleague and get back to you. 

Let’s take a look at how AI-powered knowledge bases become vital to providing high-quality customer service. 

1. AI knowledge base enables faster service

When representatives are served knowledge proactively with the help of an AI system, they don’t have to go searching for the answers they need. That means customers spend less time waiting.

While a customer on the other side doesn’t care whether an agent is being aided by AI or not, they can easily figure out the difference between an immediate answer and “I’ll have to check and get back to you on that.” So, a well-equipped customer service system speaks for itself.

Because AI can operationalize a knowledge base and fetch information from different teams available instantly, agents don’t have to pass customers from department to department while solving their problems. Moreover, customers don’t care which department they’re speaking to, they just know that they’re speaking to your company and need a resolution.

When a service agent doesn’t have to put the customer on hold or transfer calls to another department to get an answer, it’s an opportunity to grow and nurture the relationship with them. “An agent has to be empowered with all the right information to be able to answer a customer’s concern promptly,” says Kate Leggett at research firm Forrester. “Customers say that valuing their time is the most important thing businesses can do.”

2. AI helps keep content accurate, relevant, and up-to-date

Research suggests that companies with an agile approach to updating content have higher self-service ratios and better search results. AI-powered knowledge is just beyond serving content to agents so they can quickly resolve customer issues, but it can also ensure that a company’s knowledge base actually stays relevant.

In this technologically advanced era of complex products and services, curating a help center can be surprisingly difficult, but support teams can lean on AI to automate the process and make them run smoothly.

For example, AI can help mark favorite content for review at regular intervals, flag them, and leverage machine learning to identify articles that need to be updated, new content, and better search labels.

The most powerful capability of an AI-powered knowledge base is to provide insights about the most commonly used content based on what customers are asking as support requests. That empowers organizational subject matter experts to focus their contributions on what will impact customers the most, personalization of content which, in turn, frees up customer service agents to focus on white-glove service.

3. Faster onboarding and on-job training with AI

While an experienced agent may know exactly which piece of knowledge they need to tackle with a customer in a particular scenario, newbies spend a massive amount of time searching for the same information, for very obvious reasons.  

A robust knowledge base augmented with AI, however, can provide relevant knowledge to agents based on the context of an ongoing conversation, eliminating the need to search. This allows CX leaders to experience a shorter graph from training to operational curve.

Since an AI-driven knowledge base enables continuous learning for representatives and collects data from a distributed network of agents and then identifies the best solutions for customer concerns, it effectively consolidates human intelligence that increases an organization’s expertise. 

Without AI, learning and training happen in a vacuum. However, with AI, gamification comes into the picture and with gamification interactive learning and training can happen effectively. The creativity and success of an agent’s actions can be captured for the collective good of the support team for the benefit of customers.