Prepare for AI bots by optimizing your information base

Effective, individualized help has always required an excellent knowledge base as a key component.

With the introduction of AI bots, well-organized, thorough, and current knowledge bases will take center stage.

A knowledge base is what?

A knowledge base, often known as a help center, is a library of articles that users can quickly search from one single area and that provide useful solutions, advice, and other crucial details about your product or service.

SimpSocial’s AI bot can quickly and accurately provide your customers with reliable answers by consuming all the material in your knowledge base, help center, or any other public URL.

You’re practically set to go if your help documentation is well-written, well-organized, and addresses every question you want an AI bot to be able to respond to. However, there are a few things you can do to make sure your material is prepared for AI support, including both developing new help content and enhancing current content.

enhancing your knowledge base for support from AI

How can you ensure that your knowledge base is prepared to function with an AI bot?

1. Produce fresh information to fill knowledge gaps.

The time has come to review the information in your knowledge base or help center. Do you have any holes you’ve been intending to fill but haven’t had a chance to yet? Any solution that may be included in your knowledge base should be done so in order to reap the full benefits of an AI tool.

Before implementing the AI Bot, our own Support team conducted a thorough audit of more than 700 articles to make sure all the data it retrieved would be accurate and up-to-date and that any holes had been rectified.

Knowing something inside and out makes it difficult to recognize any potential areas of confusion for other people. Think about the following:

Are there any tendencies or patterns in the discussions you have with your customers that a help article could address?

Check your stored replies to see if any fit the bill for a help center article. Even if the information doesn’t appear important enough to warrant its own article, it’s a good idea to add a FAQ article for quick facts that don’t seem to fit anywhere else.

What inquiries are getting through to your support staff? Are there instances where the product should have been available for your customers to self-serve but wasn’t?

If there are already support articles, do they need to be optimized to stop clients from using your team instead of them?

How to quickly create quality, fresh helpful content

Make templates for themes that come up often.

Every new article shouldn’t need to be created from scratch by your support staff. Even if it’s only a brief sketch or paper, creating a template for your knowledge base material will help your team to grasp what a successful article should look like and speed up production. An example template would resemble this:

Work with other teams that interact with customers

To get crucial insights that spur growth and enhance your product or service, it’s necessary to solicit regular input from other customer-facing departments.

Get in touch with your sales staff and any other teams that deal with your clients on a regular basis to learn about the problems they run into. These feedback loops give you more information about your consumers’ problems, enabling you to customize your solutions to suit their tastes and demands.

Create a culture of knowledge management among these teams and motivate them to flag content that requires updates, revisions, or clarification, as well as to use the knowledge base as their own support tool.

2. Improve and upgrade current content

Your articles’ readability for AI bots (and your readers) will increase with their simplicity, clarity, and depth. AI bots will find it difficult to understand if it’s difficult for a human to read. Think about:

* Simplifying language: Consider how your users phrase their inquiries and make sure the response is presented in a pertinent and understandable manner. Use complete statements to clarify the answer for the AI Bot and, ultimately, for your customers, rather than simple “yes” or “no” responses. Your consumer might inquire, “Do I need to use the original outer shipping box to return an item?” as an example. You can use your own packaging when sending an item back for a return or exchange; there’s no requirement to keep the original shipping box, for example, in place of expressing “No.”

* Developing a scannable structure: By streamlining your help articles, you can benefit both people and artificial intelligence (AI). Make it simpler for AI bots to locate and deliver the solution your customer is seeking by using tables, numbered lists, and bullet points.

* Restating questions: Make sure your assistance content reiterates queries; doing so will assist the AI Bot in gathering relevant data and providing accurate, pertinent responses. Consider it an additional layer of clarification that benefits your AI chatbot as well as readers.

* Ensuring that articles clearly identify the audience for the material: If you have different user types and different help content for each, make sure that each help article includes a clear reference to the user type it is intended for.

* Including explanation text with images or videos: A lot of support content is offered in the form of explainer videos or screenshots, which are excellent forms for outlining intricate instructions. However, AI chatbots are unable to decipher photos or videos and provide customers with the necessary information. To help people remember the key information, it is a good idea to offer step-by-step directions with distinct bullet points and headers. Customers who are blind or visually challenged can access the help content more easily.

* Defining essential terms: Even if you believe your audience is familiar with unique phrases or acronyms, define them or spell them out the first time you use them.

How to order the most crucial upgrades to support content centeredness

We acknowledge the rapid pace of events. To quickly and efficiently make your help center as useful as possible, you need a means to prioritize the updates. You can use the following advice to decide what to tackle first:

* Use the “Last updated” filter to locate the articles that are most likely to have out-of-date information.

* Determine which of your knowledge base articles receives the most traffic (based on metrics like views and conversations that are initiated by articles), and try to make those articles as clear and educational as you can.

* Not every error in your knowledge base is the same. It is less urgent to update your help documents to reflect small cosmetic changes to your product than it is to update them with more significant functional or usability improvements.

The significance of human assistance going forward

You don’t need to immediately have a perfectly optimized assistance center. As we’ve already shown, the majority of clients favor self-service. However, it’s crucial to take care of consumers who might need (or desire) assistance, too, and problems that the AI Bot can’t solve will still be forwarded to a human support representative. Adding a help article with all the information your clients might need to contact your staff is actually a top recommendation.

Although it may seem counter-intuitive, our user testing has shown that consumers are more eager to look for a solution on their own if they know they can obtain assistance from a real support representative when they need it – by email, live chat, etc. By using this strategy, support agents will have less conversation traffic, giving them more time to handle difficult, high-value issues like billing questions and sensitive complaints.