Here's how AI tools can help you manage your knowledge base

Self-service is an underrated customer service channel. The reality is that if people can help themselves instead of talking to an agent, they probably will. All the better for service teams, because self-service options deflect frequently asked questions, saving time for agents and cutting costs.

Knowledge management is an important factor in self-service, but with a set-it-and-forget-it mindset, knowledge bases suffer from neglect.

If customers are going to a knowledge base or help center, it’s typically because they want to find an answer quickly on their own. A knowledge base lacking articles or full of dated material adds friction to what should be an effortless experience.

It means they’re going out of their way to get the answers they need. They’re repeating themselves. And agents are bogged down with FAQs that shouldn’t even be on their plates in the first place.

It’s frustrating, it’s inefficient, and it affects the bottom line.

Where to start with knowledge management

Managing a knowledge base is hard work for a business of any size. You have to keep it up to date with the most relevant information. It needs to be organized. It needs to be searchable and easy to find. In a best-case scenario, you need to be ahead of the curve and anticipate what your customers will search for. There’s an entire ecosystem of articles, and knowing which are high performing, which are low performing, and which to prioritize for updates is challenging.

This is where AI can help.

AI has a myriad of use cases beyond nearly sentient chatbots. For knowledge base managers, it works behind the scenes, helping to figure out where to start with article creation and how to optimize and prioritize updates.

First, Zendesk AI will scan every single support request that comes in, giving you insight into the most frequently asked questions as well as trending topics. For example, your business might get a lot of questions about resetting passwords or processing returns. AI will surface these questions and send friendly nudges to your service team in their workspace, allowing them to turn their expertise into articles that your customers can quickly find.

Secondly, the AI will surface insights into the performance of your articles so that you can stay on top of updates and optimizations. Low-performing articles can clog up your knowledge base, affect your SEO, and confuse your customers with out-of-date information. High-performing articles have a lot of eyes on them—it’s even more important to ensure they’re up to date. Amid shifting customer needs, changing policies, and product or service changes, AI takes away a lot of the guesswork.

How it works

AI solutions can be hard to implement, between training a language model and building algorithms. Zendesk AI works right out of the box, like an additional layer of functionality behind the scenes. It makes sense of the mountain of data that’s already at your fingertips—in your customer conversations and tickets—to improve the customer experience and agent efficiency, helping you scale your teams.

With Content Cues, you’re not only surfacing opportunities to improve the knowledge base itself, but you’re also getting signals about your customers that can help you optimize your business overall. For instance, if you see certain topics trending, you can lean into that to improve the product experience. Maybe these insights can be used to optimize the onboarding experience, or maybe you’re just collecting feedback about services and products your customers might be looking for.

Knowledge management is often neglected, but it’s an important part of the entire AI ecosystem. Knowledge bases are foundational components for AI to work well for customer service teams.

In addition to recommending articles to create and optimize, a robust knowledge base can also inform the responses given by bots. When nobody pays attention to the knowledge gaps, the bot might not be able to actually give helpful answers.

With Zendesk AI, you’re taking away friction between your customers and the answers they want. Instead of wasting time or repeating themselves to agents, they’re moving along with their day. You’re using best-in-class, accessible AI to surface opportunities to optimize your knowledge base, save time for agents, and even improve your bots.

To learn more about Zendesk AI, click here to view a demo.