AI-driven knowledge management – Why it matters to contact centres and how they can achieve it
Getting knowledge management right is one of the most important challenges any contact centre undertakes
The Austrian management consultant, Peter Drucker said: “knowledge has become the resource rather than a resource…”. Certainly, knowledge management is at the heart of the contact centre’s role, bridging the gap between customers’ enquiries and the facts, which will resolve their problems. But it is not just an important challenge, it’s a very difficult one.
Today, with extensive product lines, specialised customers, fast-changing market requirements, and complex partner relationships, there are huge volumes of data to deal with. Added to this, businesses need to think about how fast information becomes outdated, as products update continually and the knowledge generation process moves further away from those selling to and supporting the customer.
Given all this, for any business, finding the right information and getting it to the right customer quickly can be daunting. Maintaining an up-to-date knowledge-base is often the first challenge. In today’s contact centre, the latest AI technologies can help organisations achieve this goal. Whether it’s collection, distribution, or delivery of knowledge, AI can support it.
It can, for instance, automate information delivery through self-service bots; discern the point at which escalation to a human agent is appropriate, and ‘surface’ the right knowledge to help them deal with it.
AI can even apply enhanced semantic reasoning to help the agent work out what the customer needs by making internal knowledge accessible through the terms and language the customer themselves is using — thereby overcoming misunderstandings that lead to dissatisfaction. The level of intelligence being applied in this area is advancing all the time. There are subtle things the technology can increasingly do already: from parsing common misspellings, to understanding different local phrasing, like Hoover being used as a generic word for a vacuum cleaner in the UK, or gas being used in the US as an equivalent to the UK petrol. It works by being a bit fuzzier around the terms people are using, to cut through to what they really mean.
Getting the training right
AI- driven knowledge management is also increasingly key in agent training. The approach can, for example, make a huge difference in the direct delivery of customer service, with one of Enghouse’s customers — selling a vast inventory of white goods’ insurance products — cutting their training and onboarding pathway from eight weeks down to a fortnight for new agents.
They set them a challenge on day one to go and find the answer to questions — and the trainee gets immediate feedback and reward. This way also, the business can quickly embed the approach in the culture, that agents faced with difficult queries need to go and ask the AI-driven knowledge base because the answer they are seeking is going to be in there.
