Why Choose AI Knowledge Base For Better Customer Experience?

Given the skyrocketing customer expectations, delivering superior customer experiences (CX) is no easy feat today. However, to fulfill rising customer expectations, the fundamental formula remains the same- “deliver relevant answers at the right time across touchpoints.”

This requires businesses to equip customer service teams and digital channels with adequate tools, techniques, and process efficiency to help customers find faster and more accurate resolutions. 

The blog discusses the importance of an AI-powered Knowledge base for customer experience and how it helps customer-focused organizations leverage their knowledge effectively to deliver superior CX. 

What is a Knowledge base? 

A knowledge base is a centralized repository of information about an organization’s products and services. In customer service, the purpose of a knowledge base is to deliver superior customer support by enabling support teams and customers to find relevant information at the right time. 

Types of a knowledge base 

Depending on the use case in customer service operations, there are primarily 2 types of knowledge bases: 

1. Internal knowledge base: Also called an intranet or corporate wiki, an internal knowledge base is built to house all product and process documentation accessible only to employees. An internal knowledge base helps employees with on-the-job training, allows them to do their jobs well, and enables them to deliver faster and more accurate resolutions to customer problems.  

2. Eternal Knowledge base: Also called a customer service knowledge base, an external knowledge base is accessible to customers so they can find solutions on their own. It consists of guides, FAQs, help-center articles, and troubleshooting tips to help customers solve their queries via self-service channels like web chat, messaging, community forums, chatbots, etc. 

Depending on customer service needs, a business may need any of the two knowledge bases or both; internal & external knowledge bases under a single knowledge base suite.

What are some of legacy KB systems’ most common customer service challenges?

Legacy knowledge base systems store information in multiple files and formats, which results in data silos. With siloed information, delivering superior customer service is extremely difficult.

Here are major customer service challenges that organizations using legacy knowledge bases for customer experience face: 

1. Knowledge is difficult to find

Using multiple sources of truth is one of the biggest challenges associated with legacy knowledge base systems.

It takes longer for contact center agents to find relevant knowledge, which forces them to seek guidance from experts and colleagues. This results in higher average handle time(AHT) and inadequate query resolutions.

2. Lack of SOP adherence 

With customer service, SOPs scattered across docs, PDFs, and spreadsheets, legacy knowledge base systems require tremendous effort to find accurate answers.

Without clear direction to guide customers, agents get the troubleshooting process wrong and make errors.

3. Information is inconsistent across channels

Due to the lack of a unified knowledge repository, agents have different versions of knowledge to help customers across channels. A customer using phone support versus a customer using live chat or email does not receive the same service experience.

Inconsistent experiences across channels reduce brand loyalty and lower customer satisfaction.   

4. Agents toggle between multiple screens

According to a CCW Digital market study, around 90% of companies accept that their agents must access multiple interfaces to solve even the most typical customer issues.

A legacy knowledge base for customer experience forces agents to sift between various platforms to find information. This reduces their efficiency and negatively reflects how they engage with customers. 

5. Customers do not have access to self-service options 

Legacy knowledge base technology is difficult to integrate with customer contact channels like email, social media, web chat, chatbots, etc. As over 90% of the customers expect a self-service knowledge base, making do with disintegrated knowledge base systems would hamper customer experiences in the long run.   

Reasons why you need a Knowledge base for customer experience

An AI-powered knowledge base for customer experience overcomes the shortcomings of a legacy knowledge base by providing the technological sophistication to eliminate data silos, making information access easier, and helping deliver top-notch customer service across touchpoints. 

An AI-powered knowledge base for a customer experience like Knowmax is a full-suite knowledge management solution that helps organizations to use their knowledge effectively to create high-quality customer experiences. 

Here is how an AI-powered knowledge base software for CX benefits your organization: 

1. It makes knowledge readily available with an intuitive search function 

Search is the most crucial aspect of any knowledge base tool. A superior search function is critical to delivering superior customer experiences. An AI-powered knowledge base like Knowmax provides an intuitive search function to understand the context and intent of the query. 

Agents using the platform receive instant content suggestions upon typing a few keywords. Agents can search for titles of the documents as well as search within the documents. 

As time is of great importance in the customer service world, the purpose of the in-document search is to ensure faster delivery of relevant knowledge so agents do not have to read long text documents. 

The auto-tags embedded with different content modules in an AI knowledge base help agents quickly identify if a particular knowledge piece is an article, FAQ, or guided workflow. This makes knowledge readily available to agents, reducing call handling time and improving the resolution quality. 

2. Easy integrations with customer service tools for omnichannel CX  

 An A knowledge base is technologically adept at integrating with multiple customer touchpoints. With a unified knowledge base disseminating content across channels, the customer service delivered across touchpoints like phone, email, live chat, chatbot interaction, etc., remains the same. 

Delivering omnichannel experiences is critical to staying relevant in a growing digitized customer service world, as companies that provide strong omnichannel customer engagement retain 89% of customers compared to 33% of companies that lack robust omnichannel engagement. 

Before publishing content on an omnichannel knowledge base like Knowmax, relevant departments and channels can be selected for content distribution.

The omnichannel content distribution powers digital customer experiences, encouraging customers to resolve their queries independently without needing to contact agents. This improves customer satisfaction as 91% of customers across the globe expect brands to provide online self-service options. 

A consistent flow of information across channels through the Knowmax Knowledge base

3. Next best action steps for mistake-proof customer service 

When agents know the exact steps to guide customers, they feel confident and empowered to engage in meaningful conversations.

To guide agents effectively, it is vital to organize complex Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) as guided workflow steps, so they do not miss any critical step and deliver mistake-proof customer service.  

With Knowmax’s knowledge base modules for a customer experience like cognitive decision trees, customer service SOPs can be organized into guided workflows to help agents with the next best action steps during customer conversations.

The workflow steps can be linked with multiple APIs to auto-traverse customer information from the CRM platform to reduce average handle time (AHT) and personalize customer experiences. 

Other content modules like articles, FAQs, or multimedia files like pictures, videos, and GIFs can be added to the workflow steps.

The guide workflows can be integrated with chatbots to help customers with step-by-step instructions to resolve problems faster and accurately on their own. 

4. Resolution of multiple queries at once with the chrome extension 

Improving agent experiences is critical to improving customer experiences. Agents must have convenient access to all the information they need to do their work well. 

The chrome extension widget of the Knowmax Knowledge base for customer experience ensures that agents have ready access to all the knowledge available on the Knowmax platform, even when using a different platform. 

The chrome extension widget does away with the need to toggle between screens and delivers knowledge right where the agents are present. This increases agents’ efficiency and helps them engage effectively with multiple customers at once.

5. Content performance reports tracking knowledge base health  

A knowledge base is always a work in progress. A knowledge base for customer experience is critical, with built-in analytics to track users’ engagement with knowledge base content. 

Tracking the knowledge base regularly helps the subject matter experts (SMEs) to identify what is working and not working for their customers and employees. 

With Knowmax, the built-in micro-segmented analytics tracks metrics like the total time agents spend on each knowledge piece, the top searched keywords, usage of each content piece, and more.

The timely content performance reports with these metrics help organizations to draw actionable insights to improve their CX strategy. 

Summing up

To fulfill and even exceed ever-evolving CX needs, businesses need robust knowledge management practices to capture, organize and manage their knowledge effectively. 

Legacy knowledge base systems that once helped are now falling short of meeting new-age customer demands, making it critical for organizations to shift to AI-backed knowledge base for customer experience needs.