In the rush to adopt strategies around artificial intelligence (AI), the most pivotal figures are the people in your organization tasked with navigating technology integration and making that technology work with your organization’s current resources. For example, maintaining an AI knowledge base can be instrumental for your organization — and the success of AI — but it may not get the focus it needs in these conversations. In this article, we’ll explore how integrating AI into your organization can empower your knowledge base.
AI Knowledge Base: The Catalyst for Efficiency
For the sake of this article, we’re assuming your organization already has a knowledge base. If you don’t, we have guides and other articles that explain the value of upgrading a knowledge base to a proper knowledge management system and how to start the process for your organization.
If you already have an organized knowledge base, then you know the value of making knowledge accessible. You also know that just because knowledge is accessible doesn’t mean your workforce will access it. Your workforce may be resistant to procedures for storing and obtaining knowledge or your technology and products are met with resistance for a variety of reasons.
These challenges have been long-standing but there’s now a solution: AI. It’s not just a buzzword, it’s the pragmatic next step for operational efficiency. Let’s explain how:
Streamlined Onboarding with an AI Knowledge Base
Any customer experience professional knows how systems can be perfect, but people often are not. Sometimes the system has to change to adapt to imperfections that can’t be controlled. Sometimes the system can’t be changed, so your organization relies on onboarding to keep everyone aligned on policies and procedures.
For some organizations, onboarding can be a huge cost and operational risk. For example, call centers have experienced staffing and retention problems which further compound the risk of long onboarding. It’s expensive to take an experienced support agent and have them train a new agent for several weeks — or months — but it is especially expensive to perform that training and have the new agent leave less than a year later.
How does AI resolve this problem? By making your organization’s knowledge accessible right away. AI-driven products act as a resource for your organization’s knowledge without requiring costly onboarding. Knowledge management products can integrate into applications where agents are already working to provide accurate answers quickly. Your agents can act with the confidence of your organization’s knowledge because AI is empowering their access to the knowledge base you’ve set-up and maintained.
Compliance and Security
Making knowledge more accessible has an obvious benefit for your organization, but accessible knowledge can also mean more compliance concerns. If you’re in an industry like healthcare, finance, or insurance then the prospect of organizational knowledge being more accessible sounds like a security risk.
Products providing AI-driven knowledge management can address security concerns by ensuring your administrators have control, transparency, and trust in your knowledge base. We’ve talked about how some AI products feel like magic, but decision makers don’t want magic — they want to know how it works.
What information is being accessed? Can you control who gets what? Is it possible to audit responses to resolve security and compliance concerns?
AI-powered solutions such as Shelf’s NextGen KMS give administrators control over what knowledge is accessible. This prevents sensitive data from being provided to agents or customers who should not have access. Transparency is provided through sourcing and citation of answers. Whenever an answer is provided to an agent, it comes with a link to the relevant document that generated the answer. Administrators with control and transparency can trust the information they’re storing and sharing is compliant with security concerns.
Reducing Strain on Resources with an AI Knowledge Base
It takes time and effort to maintain a knowledge management system. Documents need to be routinely updated to prevent duplicates, contradictions, or out-of-date information influencing the answers provided throughout your organization. We’ve seen a number of our clients dedicate a lot of resources to manually maintaining knowledge, but not every organization has those resources.
Knowledge management can be augmented with AI products to automate the maintenance of knowledge. Products powered by AI can provide analytics on what documents are accessed most frequently, how those documents relate to successful resolutions, or if a section of your knowledge base hasn’t been accessed for some time. These analytics reduce the burden of maintenance of knowledge which ensures the value of your knowledge infrastructure, while freeing resources to invest in other areas.
In Summary
A knowledge base can be empowered by AI and provide the following benefits to your organization:
- Streamlined onboarding thanks to integrating your organization’s knowledge into a solution support agents can easily access.
- Greater security and compliance control due to AI-driven products providing detailed information on what knowledge is accessed
- Reduced strain on resources by providing useful feedback to your organization on what documents act as the source of generated answers.
Artificial intelligence is certain to change the nature of work and the roles of responsibilities of specific departments and industries. Luckily, the first wave of these changes will make the day-to-day responsibilities of these professionals more manageable — and increase the value of these roles in any organization.
