Having a complete, current, and correct base of knowledge for customer service has always been a challenge. Today, getting your knowledge house in order is more important than ever before. As organizations seek to leverage artificial intelligence, and generative AI in particular, to coach agents, recommend solutions, and even interact directly with customers, the difference between deflection, disinformation, and disaster rests on your knowledge.
In talking with customer service leaders who have begun to take the leap with generative AI, having a thoughtful and thorough approach to building and curating the knowledge base had a huge impact in terms of the time, effort, and expertise required to deploy generative AI capabilities and the scale of benefits they achieved.
Even if you're not planning on pulling the generative AI trigger any time soon, assessing the health of your knowledge base today will help improve your current operations by enabling agents and customers to more easily find answers and resolve issues.
Where does your knowledge base live today? Is it up-to-date, consistent, and well-structured? Is it formatted consistently, with clear categories, consistent use of lists and tables, and tagged with metadata such as version, source, and creation date? Is it written in natural language that is easy to understand for a non-expert audience? Does it have a clear taxonomy that everyone understands?
Once that you've established that your knowledge base content and structure are in good shape, congratulations! You're behind, because your customers already have new questions for which your agents are trying to answer You need a strategy for ongoing knowledge curation.
A knowledge base is a living document that needs to evolve as your products, customers, questions, and cases evolve. You should have owners who are human beings who are responsible for regular reviews and updates, analytics and metrics that help you understand when the knowledge base is being used successfully and emerging common customer issues where new information is needed, and ways to gather user feedback and up/down votes.
You also need a means to capture the tribal knowledge that gets shared outside your knowledge base, whether it's sticky notes, shared text files or documents, emails, internal collaboration channels, or new customer cases. The good news is that even untrained AI tools today can do a pretty good job of summarizing content outside of your knowledge base.
You'll also want to look at non-text sources of tribal knowledge, such as images and videos that can help understand complex topics. The more you can integrate that tribal knowledge into your knowledge base on an ongoing basis, the more likely agents are to trust the knowledge base and use it and the more likely they are to contribute to its care and feeding.
Managing knowledge is an ongoing process that can only be successful if you have the people, technologies, and culture in place to make it happen. That means enabling agents to share their experiences and knowledge as easily and seamlessly as possible, rewarding agents who share their knowledge and contribute to the knowledge base, and having clear and consistent training and onboarding processes that leverage and reinforce use of the knowledge base (vs. shadow training or tribal sources).
The good news is that, even if your knowledge base is less than perfect today, you can use basic AI capabilities to summarize cases and draft knowledge base articles from other content in a consistent tone and format. So, AI presents a great opportunity to accelerate getting your knowledge base in order so it can be more effective for both human and future digital agents and a means to automate much of what you should be doing to maintain your knowledge base today.
With a clear strategy around content and structure, processes to maintain and update your knowledge base, and a culture that reinforces the shared power of knowledge, you're setting up your customer service organization for greater AI automation potential, more effective agents, and better customer experiences.
Rebecca Wettemann is founder and CEO of Valoir.