How AI and knowledge management are changing the CX game

This is a guest blog from Simran Dudeja, product marketing manager at Knowmax.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has changed the customer service game, enhancing how companies interact with customers.

The rapidly evolving digital landscape is creating new and unique ways to register complaints and solve their issues. This goes a long way in improving the customer experience. Although knowledge management (KM) systems have existed for decades now, AI-powered knowledge management is transforming customer experience (CX) like never before, simultaneously helping global companies on both front and back-end operations.

How does knowledge management enhance CX?

A unified knowledge management system is a complete suite of solutions built to provide a one-stop solution to customer service agents and customers from a single source of truth. Here are four ways how a complete solution offers incredible benefits to companies:

1. Omnichannel customer experience.
An omnichannel CX strategy is essentially being present everywhere your customers could be and providing them superior service at the channel of their choice. Effectively, it ensures a seamless customer experience across all touchpoints.

2. Information consistency.
A knowledge management platform also brings a much-needed consistency in CX across channels by providing the same information regardless of the platform the consumer chooses to interact through.

3. Faster query resolution. 
Longer wait times and call forwards are one of the prime reasons for low customer satisfaction. Customers today are impatient and want resolution in no time. A robust knowledge management system enables agents with seamless access to contextual information that lets them troubleshoot customer queries quickly and efficiently.

4. Improved quality of resolution.
An intelligent knowledge management system significantly improves the quality of resolution. With a robust knowledge base in place, support teams have the correct information at their fingertips, helping them provide better solutions to customer queries and complaints.

How can an AI-powered knowledge management system help?

Customer service has become more complex, and contact centers have to manage many calls, affecting the customer experience. AI-powered knowledge management systems can store the history and context of customer data to efficiently deliver accurate information and mistake-proof answers to customer queries and provide a speedy resolution.

An intelligent knowledge management platform has five key advantages to enhance customer service:

1. Cognitive decision trees.
An intelligent decision tree function similar to robotic process automation helps automate various resolutions. With a no-code DIY tool, custom workflows can easily be created by all stakeholders. The interactive function provides the next best action through which customer queries can be solved in a few simple clicks.

2. Semantic search.
With keywords, meta tags, and in-document search, the findability, and searchability of information increases. This equips customer service teams to handle all types of customer queries with ease.

3. Interactive how-to guides. 
Interactive how-to guides help solve complex queries through pictorial support. Visual guides ensure faster and efficient resolutions for agents and users by using images and graphical tools which are easier to grasp than text.

4. Self-service.
In today’s customer-first culture, it is essential to set up a customer support page on your website, enable in-app support, train chatbots, and continuously make them better with the power of an AI platform. This helps deflect calls from the call center and save on support costs, all while creating a digital-first experience.

5. Remote visual assistance.
The post-pandemic era has changed customers’ demands for contactless support and self-service. It is easy to implement remote visual assistance with the help of knowledge management systems and provide solutions to your customers remotely. This also simplifies customer interactions through live camera and remote screen access between agents and a series of questions accompanied by multi-choice type answers.

Knowledge bases provide some incredible benefits in handling customer service, but only when powered with AI technology do customers experience unique and fresh ways of communication.

Artificial intelligence has helped to transform knowledge management on multiple fronts:

• AI-enabled contact centers provide personalized customer interactions by storing and leveraging recent customer data and conversations.
• AI can help run intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs), and analyze calls in real-time to draw insights on customer queries and possible solutions. They can also predict the follow-up questions of customers, helping agents stay better prepared.
• AI can take the pressure of manually answering mundane calls off of agents through the power of automation. AI can also perform these tasks for several customers at once, reducing the time spent, and improving overall efficiency.
• AI chatbots powered by a knowledge management system can utilize existing data to predict problem patterns and enhance the overall user experience. Once calibrated and updated regularly, it is an efficient, effective, and cost-friendly approach to customer service.

An AI-backed knowledge management system can improve chatbot efficiency by 40% and reduce 15-20% support costs. Knowledge management and AI implementation are bound to change the face of your customer experience (CX) and take your customer satisfaction to the next level.