Enhance your chatbot with a knowledge base

Conversational commerce, powered by chatbot interactions, is on the rise. And the benefits of using chatbots in commerce are clear. But how can you go beyond training your chatbot to handle common customer queries? With a chatbot knowledge base.

Your knowledge base is your contact center’s centralized repository. Within this repository, you store knowledge – usually in the form of guides and documents.

This knowledge can be quickly and efficiently accessed by agents while they communicate with customers, as well as at any other time.

But it isn’t just for agents.

Chatbots can also pull data from your knowledge center. This helps keep your cutting edge customer service technology, well… cutting edge.

By connecting to your knowledge base, chatbots and customer support agents can leverage crucial information to make sure they provide up-to-date, relevant responses to customers and serve them better and faster.

A chatbot connected to your knowledge base can access a wealth of data and quickly reply to customer queries with the most up-to-date data in your organization.

In addition to providing answers fast, your customers also receive accurate information with regards to policies, products, FAQs, etc.

This also benefits your customer service teams by funneling repetitive, simple questions towards an AI assistant, rather than burdening human agents.

By taking on high volumes of simpler questions, chatbots help customer service agents deal with more complex queries.

But – by populating your knowledge base with best practice responses, your chatbot can access resolutions to customer queries of increasing complexity. 

This helps chatbots take on frequent customer queries, further helping agents address more critical ones.

How much more efficient does this make you? According to a joint study by MIT and Stanford University – up to 35% more.

This is all thanks to the ability to share knowledge between human agents and chatbots.

The longer your contact center is operational, the more knowledge it gathers.

By implementing a central knowledge repository of this type, organizations can keep best practices in one place – even when top performing agents leave your organization.

And by making this information available to your chatbots, you can scale best practice interactions for faster resolution for increasingly complex queries – for agents as well as automated assistants.

A knowledge base enhances knowledge sharing culture within the company by allowing everybody to contribute. Of course, you can implement an “approval phase” in which senior members or management will have to approve a content piece before it’s available for everyone.

The great thing about this is, not only will news quickly be distributed, but also tips and tricks, and best practices. With a knowledge base, you can leverage your top performers’ experience and scale it across the whole organization.

Errors always reflect poorly on the company and user perception. So, the goal of every contact center is to try and minimize them.

A modern cloud-based contact center will save all interactions with a specific customer, no matter which channel they are using to communicate with you. So, whenever this customer reaches out, human agents and chatbots connected to the knowledge base will have access to their full communication history.

This empowers your human or chatbot agents to quickly access all the information about possible questions, by simply searching for a keyword in knowledge base.

This level of standardization is very important, especially when the “standard” being set is based off interactions with your most successful agents.

Contact center solutions have sentiment analysis and CSAT measuring. This means that you can test or analyze to find out which responses have the highest scores and make them the standard in the knowledge base. This establishes the best practices and empowers all your agents with them.

We should also mention knowledge centralization. As organizations grow, especially if a lot of departments or regions contribute to content creation, content can often be found in different sources. Knowledge Base is a centralized place that draws data from all available sources. This means that no matter which tool, site, or repository is used by which team, all the knowledge and information is available in an instant.

Today it’s evident that chatbots are an integral part of contact centers. They reduce agent workload, and take over high-volume – low-complexity queries, freeing up agents to focus on more demanding work. This is beneficial for everyone as it increases agent satisfaction and shortens resolution time for customers.

Companies usually use rule-based chatbots, which guide users through a series of menus.

Increasingly, however, you’ll find companies using an AI chatbot, to provide conversational experiences. And connecting your chatbot to a knowledge base can supercharge it, increasing the use cases it can cover, and even further reduce agent involvement.

Creating a chatbot that can cover hundreds of questions and solve hundreds of issues can be slow and expensive – and it requires regular maintenance. But connecting your chatbot to a knowledge base can solve all of those problems.

Chatbots will instantly be enriched with all the data already in your knowledge base, and depending on the channel you use, will be able to send video tutorials, pdf files, images, or audio files.

This can greatly reduce your customer service workload, and wait time for customers, especially on peak days. It’s all about increasing customer experience and satisfaction. Today, customers want information quickly but also with the rise of digitalization, they want that information on a variety of channels. Chatbots are a great tool for that, and are rapidly becoming a new standard for customer service.