Customers have questions, and you have the answers, but your consumers want a better method for asking them and receiving accurate responses. They frequently contact you over the phone or send emails, but this requires the attention of your frontline staff, adds stress, and costs money. Wouldn't it be better to leverage a knowledge management system and provide access to your knowledge base using a chatbot to add value to your customers and reduce the costs of running your business?
What's Knowledge Management (KM)?
Knowledge management is the study and application of methods for managing knowledge in a company. It's a multi-faceted approach for making the greatest use of company know-how to meet business goals such as improving customer experience, increasing competitive advantage, enhancing performance, stimulating innovation, and continuously improving the firm.
Knowledge Management Process
Step 1
In most organisations, decision-makers will first determine how to use new technology to make better use of organisational subject matter expertise. This is why information technology is so important for knowledge management capture.
Step 2
Specific concerns in this area include how the company culture rewards knowledge sharing. In some situations, it may be required to enrich or modify business culture, by adjusting the compensation scheme to reward information sharing.
Step 3
Finally, content management and information taxonomy, are the critical stages of the process. These stages are important for ensuring that information is easily accessible, well-organized, and comprehensive.
What's a Knowledge Management System?
Knowledge management systems are a part of the organisational learning process, but they are more focused on managing knowledge as a shareable business asset in the long run. The major objective of a knowledge management system is to connect those seeking information to expert advice to boost brand recognition and satisfaction among customers. Four knowledge management objectives help in reaching that goal. These goals are:
- enhancing the knowledge capture process,
- streamlining and improving the knowledge environment,
- increasing access to organisational knowledge,
- and maintaining knowledge as a business asset.
Benefits of Knowledge Management Systems and Tools
- Makes internal knowledge readily stored and organised.
- Enables deeper, richer, more transparent communication.
- It makes the greatest use of what you already know.
- Improves the ability to express brand, service, and product value to others.
- Allows for universal access to business knowledge assets.
- It's important in gaining a competitive edge.
Knowledge Management Solutions and Technologies
Knowledge management solutions and technologies are usually divided into several categories. Business knowledge sharing and collaboration is made easier through knowledge management software. Communication apps, content management systems, and workflows are examples of this sort of knowledge management solution because they simplify and streamline information maintenance and sharing processes.
Knowledge Management Best Practices
Whether you're a business seeking to implement more intelligent knowledge management solutions, or a solopreneur looking for new ways to keep your know-how organised and beneficial to your business, it's critical to follow best practices. These are the areas to focus on:
Content Management
It is the process of organizing and managing content to make it easily accessible. Content management systems should be used to make all organizational information and data readily available and user-friendly. For a smooth information experience, content needs to be searchable, well-indexed and linked to external sources.
Location of Expertise
The location of expertise is knowing who understands a given problem and can provide insights. Your company's content must be a true reflection of your messaging. This means that your client-facing staff needs to be very much involved in the selection and production of all of your content because they interact with customers daily and can draw conclusions based on that experience.
Continuous Improvement
Although there should be a major focus placed on creating the best possible content from the very beginning, after that, it's critical to actively capture additional information in the form of conversation metrics and continuously improve. This closes the feedback loop and enables continuous adaptation to customer needs.
What's a Knowledge Base?
A knowledge base is a result of gathering and organizing all the knowledge into a useable form through a process called knowledge management that's been described earlier. It's a database of information on subjects specific to your business and niche. Its purpose is to locate answers to simple questions or issues without having to ask for human assistance.
What Types of Written Content a Knowledge Base Contains?
There are generally two types of written content that knowledge bases rely upon:
Structured Content
Structured content is data that has a specific format. When it is in this format, it is easy to use and understand. People usually put structured data into tables with rows and columns. A common example of structured content is frequently asked questions. They are stored in the knowledge base to provide long-lasting storage to all the relevant information your clients need.
Unstructured Content
Unstructured content is information that does not follow a defined structure or is not organized in a specific way. Unstructured data, often consisting of text, may also include dates, numbers, and facts. Typical examples of unstructured data include websites, blog articles, word documents, PowerPoint presentations, plain text documents, and PDFs.
How to Create a Knowledge Base?
Humans have developed a wide range of information storage and retrieval technologies. Shared document systems, wikis, and intranets are probably not the first technologies you'd consider for transferring knowledge to your clients since there are way more efficient dedicated knowledge management tools available. These tools include:
Content Management System (CMS)
CMS is a software application that helps with the creation, and management of digital content. It usually supports multiple users in a collaborative environment by integrating on-demand access to knowledge assets with analytical data about their perceived usefulness by the customers. It's a central element of an effective knowledge base system enabling business staff to create, maintain and improve customer-facing information in an organised and user-friendly way,
FAQ Bot / QnA Bot
An FAQ bot is often also called a QnA bot and is an interface that enables access to frequently asked questions stored in a database. It's like having an encyclopedia in customers' pockets to answer any question about your products and services. It uses full-text search queries and performs linguistic searches against structured documents stored in a database. It includes single or multiple keywords or phrases and returns the best results that match search conditions.
Knowledge Base Chatbot
A knowledge base chatbot is an evolution of a FAQ (QnA) bot because it provides a natural language interface to your knowledge base containing both structured and unstructured content. It's a highly sophisticated bot that allows users to ask questions using natural language through both voice and text interactions. It delivers precise answers to inquiries, providing your customers with a sense of interacting with an actual expert.
How does Knowledge Base Chatbot work?
By applying artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, a natural language knowledge base chatbot can understand the intent of your customers' questions and use this data to find contextually relevant answers in your knowledge base.
Knowledge Base Chatbot Use Cases
A natural language knowledge base allows you to automate access to business knowledge and improve marketing, sales, and customer service, without replacing human interaction. The capacity to understand what customers want to know about your products and services can save hours for your employees and free up resources so they can focus on providing the most value to your customers.
Marketing Knowledge Base Chatbot
Marketing knowledge base chatbots provide customers with information about potential solutions to the problem they're experiencing or the basic information about the company, areas of expertise, opening hours, customer reviews, locations, and more. When a customer wants to know more details, they will ask the bot what it can do and how it can be beneficial for them. The chatbot will explain to the customer how your business can match their needs, provide information about the benefits of your offer, and give them all the relevant information they need to decide on whether or not they should engage in further conversation. All of which can help to generate demand for your products and services.
Sales Knowledge Base Chatbot
Sales knowledge base chatbots help to close deals faster by providing crucial product or service information, your availability, prices, and potential discounts at the exact moment it's needed. Many salespeople meet their prospects cold, meaning that they don't have any direct knowledge about what exactly brought them to that particular product/service and how interested they are in buying it. To avoid wasting time on irrelevant prospects and losing potential clients due to a lack of necessary knowledge, most effective companies employ chatbots to help them in their inbound sales efforts by answering questions about their products or services to close the deals faster.
Help Desk Knowledge Base Chatbot
Help desk or customer service knowledge base chatbots provide customers with self-service access to product or service information 24/7 at any time of the day or night. In addition to answering frequently asked questions about upcoming appointments, rescheduling, and cancellations, these chatbots can also provide directions to your business establishment and help you recognise and address customer needs before they escalate into a problem. This is important because it creates a pleasant experience for your clients and raises the levels of overall satisfaction from the service you provide and makes them more likely to return.
What Type of Questions a Knowledge Base Chatbot Can Answer?
Knowledge base chatbot should answer the following types of questions:
Factoid Questions
Factoid questions (who, what, when, where): these questions call for fact-based answers that may be provided in the form of a single word or phrase. The precise response, nevertheless, must be explicitly stated in the ingested text content.
Descriptive Questions
Questions that might be addressed by a sentence, passage, or the entire document. For example, "When do I have to submit a personal tax return?" or "How do I get tax benefits for lower-income families?".
Keyword Searches
Keyword searches like "Health Benefits" or "Cost Savings" are speculative because the intent and scope are not very clear. In these cases, a knowledge base chatbot tries to infer the intent behind the search and return a relevant answer.
What Happens When a Knowledge Base Chatbot Doesn't Know the Answer?
When no answer satisfies an acceptable level of certainty, there are three ways a chatbot can respond:
Don't Know Response
This type of response is usually delivered when there's no better alternative and is essentially an equivalent of a 404 page for websites. A common approach to handle this type of situation is to apologise and ask the user to rephrase their question.
Link to a Document
When the results return doesn't satisfy the minimum requirements is also a common practice to send a link to a document that describes the problem in a broader sense, letting the user quickly skim through it and decide for themselves.
Handover to a Human
Chatbots still cannot handle questions for which the answers require cross-document passage aggregation, calculations, or other types of complex reasoning. When this happens it's common to hand the conversation over to a human agent.
Concluision
Knowledge bases are a great way to simplify repeatable customer enquires and help them find what they need quickly. You can use this type of software as a front-end tool in support channels or as part of your omnichannel strategy by adding it to landing pages on websites where customers need more information before making a purchase decision.
The capacity to understand what customers want to know about your products and services can save hours for your employees and free up resources so they can focus on providing the most value possible for those who choose you over competitors.