With artificial intelligence (AI) injecting new life into knowledge management (KM), its dusty brand image is suddenly highly relevant and necessary to enterprise organizations. Today’s KM is a game-changer—transforming the contact center, helping agents and self-service channels score big increases in customer satisfaction.
What a Difference AI Makes
In the old days, when customers had questions for businesses, they might have received a set of FAQs to plow through. Or they might have heard an “I’ll have to get back to you” response from a contact center agent.
Today, customers can get a specific answer the first time around from the agent or self-service system thanks to advanced knowledge management solutions.
This precision is the difference AI tools are making for companies today. In the process, they are revolutionizing traditionally cumbersome KM—moving beyond knowledge management to knowledge automation for today’s contact center.
How It Works
The brain of an AI-infused KM solution has millions of contextual associations to anticipate what customers are trying to do and look for answers beyond the words typed in a search. For example, can a user’s identity or location help personalize the result? Can the conversation help the system predict the best next action to solve the customer’s issue?
The solutions drive customer satisfaction and operational efficiencies with the following three key features:
- Fast access. Natural language processing lets agents and customers find up-to-date information using common, everyday language. Natural language search capabilities enable the tools to understand what customers and employees mean when they search—even if it’s not exactly what they type.
- Precise delivery. Traditional KM systems use the same metadata label on all customer questions about returning merchandise, for example. New AI systems trained with custom data sets can distinguish between questions about mail drop-offs and in-store returns, total health coverage, or supplemental coverage for Medicare. They offer an essential sentence or paragraph pinpointed to the specific question, not a lengthy document or page of FAQs for customers to plow through.
- Easy updates. Employees can contribute to the knowledge base instead of simply dumping new content into the library. With AI, the knowledge base keeps itself organized, by putting new content exactly where it belongs. Agents can easily create and submit content to the knowledge base where content approvers can publish in two clicks, at which point the KM system automatically links it to other relevant content.
Solutions in Action
Equiniti, a financial services firm, is engaging with millions of U.K. citizens through its B2B service line, and providing a range of consumer stockholder services. The company wanted an application that enabled customers to self-serve on any platform, any device.
So, Equiniti replaced its static, legacy FAQ, with an AI-infused KM system that makes it easy for customers to access the right information 24/7. The system grew from 170 questions and answers to an over 700 query string after the first three months of use. User adoption has been excellent, and the new KM system has helped the company see real growth in customer investment volumes.
A multinational automaker company wanted to make consistent, accurate information easily available—whether it is for a customer in self-service mode, as part of an advisor-assisted engagement in the contact center, or by staff in retail stores. It also looked to improve call advisor training and onboarding, to increase call and email deflection to self-service where preferred by the customer, and to keep dealerships across Europe up to date with increasingly complex products and services.
With countless store interactions involving 10,000 retail staff and more than 1,000 employees, the new system has wide-ranging benefits. AI-infused KM has made it easy for customers and staff to find and share knowledge. And customer service is now living up to the premium-brand expectations of the automaker’s customers.
When AI is the Real Deal
There’s a lot of hype in the market today about AI. Unfortunately, some vendors say their solutions have AI, when in fact, it’s automation technology at work. Automation enables machines to perform repetitive, mundane tasks. AI goes a step further, simulating human thinking by learning from experience, finding patterns, and choosing the appropriate responses based on what it has learned.
The new KM tools can truthfully claim that AI is part of their architecture. As such, they’re some of the best new tools a contact center can have in its competitive arsenal.
