The Ticket: Fueling the AI machine with the knowledge it needs

Feeding the AI beast with the accurate, up-to-date knowledge your customers need is key to success in this new era of AI-driven customer service.

When your support team is constantly firefighting and tackling support queues, carving out time to do other things like create help content can feel costly. But, your knowledge content is – and always was – a key source of information to help your customers self-serve.

Now, it’s also critical for fueling the AI support engine to give your customers accurate, trustworthy answers. As we’ve seen firsthand at Intercom, investing time and care into your help content can significantly boost your automated resolution rate.

This week on The Ticket podcast, our Director of Automated and Proactive Support, Ruth O’Brien, and our Director of Human Support, Bobby Stapleton, dive into the importance of creating a culture of knowledge management for unlocking AI success and delivering a great customer experience.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the podcast:

• Keeping your help center up to date is essential. Many busy support teams struggle to prioritize maintaining their help centers due to limited time and resources. But it’s worth putting effort into filling in content gaps and updating your content when you launch new products and services. This helps AI give your customers the instant, precise answers they crave, increasing their satisfaction and saving your support team time answering repetitive queries.
• Great knowledge content compounds in value over time. If you make X change to your help content, how do you see Y results? At Intercom, when we moved from Resolution Bot (which is our old chatbot product) to Fin, our industry-leading AI chatbot, resolution rates skyrocketed. The results our team and our customers have achieved with Fin have been astonishing from the start and have compounded in value over time.
• Knowledge management should be the whole company’s responsibility. If you have a large or complex product or service, it’s difficult for one person to create and refresh your full suite of content on a regular basis. That’s why it’s critical to cultivate a company culture that recognizes the importance of knowledge management. Get input from other teams – like product, engineering, sales, and marketing – to help your team create new content and keep existing content up to date. Establish a system where teammates from across the company can flag outdated content or suggest new additions.
• The future of knowledge management is full of potential. Creating knowledge content won’t just be helpful for providing AI with customer-facing information. In the near future, support teams will also be able to feed AI internal knowledge, which it can then use to help support agents quickly answer more complex and niche queries too.

If you enjoy our discussion, check out more episodes of our podcast. You can follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or grab the RSS feed in your player of choice.