How to Unlock Your Knowledge Base System with Messaging

Many companies have a robust knowledge base but are missing the opportunity to maximize its value to the business. When combined with messaging and automation, a knowledge base system can provide dramatic improvements to customer support while reducing operational costs required to service customers and internal users in the best ways possible.

Look at it this way: when people can effectively help themselves, the instant answers they receive boost their satisfaction and simultaneously reduces your need to service them with costly live agent support. Let’s take a closer look at how easy this is to achieve.

A knowledge base system defined

Knowledge base systems contain large amounts of content for use by your customers and employees. These external and internal users can access a wide variety of information, such as articles, videos, apps, and much more. Since knowledge bases are accessible online and/or within apps, they provide always-on self-service, enabling companies to pursue global strategies, supporting customers across time zones more easily and cost-efficiently. In addition, users can access the knowledge base from anywhere, whether they are in an app, on the web, working from an office, or at a café.

A well-planned knowledge base holds all the necessary content to satisfy a wide range of requests, from the once-per-year customer to the heavy app user. With robust knowledge base content, people can self-service across numerous subject areas. The only limitation is based upon the content limits you set yourself.

Boosting the effectiveness of knowledge base systems with messaging and AI-assisted bots

Using messaging and automation, a customer service team can more effectively leverage their knowledge base to offer users effective self-service, encouraging them to resolve issues on their own.

Through interactive messaging found in modern customer service platforms, AI can guide the user to the best knowledge base content, as fast as possible. The AI bases its decisions on keywords input by the user which it uses as cues to point to specific content or to route the discussion to other self-service options, a bot, or to an agent if needed.

For example, when a user inputs the term ‘can’t log into app’, the AI-powered system may provide pointers to articles from the knowledge base about how to resolve mobile app login and password issues. But, if the user inputs a phrase like ‘my package never arrived’, it may decide to pass the user to a bot that can take the user through a step-by-step workflow to resolve their order issue.

Modern customer service platforms that incorporate messaging and automation can integrate a wide range of systems by using standard APIs. This means that you can fully automate user interactions for virtually any issue type without a heavy reliance on IT or development resources.

The more comprehensive and applicable your knowledge base, the more targeted your messaging and self-service guidance will be. By selectively incorporating AI and bots into the asynchronous messaging process, you can automate over 50 percent of customer support interactions. Your live agents become reserved for only the most complex issues or situations where you may want a live agent to up-sell or cross-sell a customer. Either way, you are reducing agent backlog and ensuring agents maximize their potential value-add.

Showing you the savings with messaging and automation

At the end of the day, applying messaging and automation to your knowledge base can result in huge savings. First, you do not have to become an expert on knowledge base systems in order to drive value across customer service operations. A modern digital customer service platform should come with this type of messaging and automation capability baked into it.

From an agent efficiency standpoint, you can reduce the number of agent-sent messages and live discussions, freeing up your agents to work on more issues within a specific time frame.

What makes messaging and automation so powerful is that you gain all these customer experience boosts and operational benefits from a system you already have in place – your knowledge base system. The hard work has been done. All you have to do now is allow messaging and automation to extract additional benefits.