3 Ways Chatbots Enhance Your Knowledge Base Experience
Tired of clients contacting your support team, looking for answers that are readily available in your FAQs?
There are very strong arguments to make for having a knowledge base on your website. Unfortunately, consumers increasingly look for instant, direct, one-to-one help. Recent research shows 31% of customers want instant help, and 40% want help within five minutes.
FAQs, while in theory fantastic, can sometimes be difficult to use. Finding the exact answer you are looking for requires you to know exactly where to look. Far from the instant experience your customers expect.
Your knowledge base is wasted if the user can’t navigate themselves through the sea of information available to them, a daunting task at the best of times.
How do you make looking for information less intimidating? In this article, we discover how FAQ chatbots help by providing information in a digestible, one-to-one format.
Couldn't join us live? Fear not, this webinar's recording is available: Chatbots and Customer Self-Serving.
Information in the digital age
Digital search tools have certainly made life much easier.
Before the 1990s, the most effective search came from asking your local librarian what they had available. The internet took a lot of pressure off librarians all around the world by searching through millions of results in a fraction of the time!
However, making all that information easier to access at an entry-level didn’t fix every problem, and even created a few new ones…
Your website can provide search results for almost everything (and we mean everything) relevant to the search query entered by a customer.
However, any convenience at this initial search stage becomes irrelevant when you realise that you still have to look through each result to find the exact information you require.
In the example above, a simple query like 'how do I log in' returned over 150 results (and none of the top results answered the query). This is not helpful.
It might be that the search query wasn’t accurate enough, forcing the knowledge base to return irrelevant information. Or, perhaps, the information isn’t even there.
Either way, this is a terrible user experience.
For all the benefits of a search function, the odds are still stacked against a user who doesn’t find their answers in the first few results.
How a chatbot re-vitalises your knowledge base
Not unlike the search tool of your knowledge base, a chatbot can hold an almost infinite amount of data. Ask it a question and it will comb through its database in an instant, and return an answer.
So, what's the difference between this experience and a knowledge base search?
There are three.
1. Chatbots understand variants
Chatbots rely on natural language processing (NLP), a process that allows them to interpret messages and return something relevant.
Learn all the chatbot lingo with our Essential Chatbot Glossary (for Non-Geeks).
A strong NLP engine understands variations of the same question. For example, a chatbot may understand that
- How do I log in?
- How do I login?
- Where do I login?
- How do I sign on?
- Where is the login page?
Are all the same question. A chatbot is capable of interpreting the same question asked in completely different ways to provide the same (relevant) response.
In this example, asking the same question to the ubisend HR chatbot in three different ways returns the same relevant answer.
This contrasts with a simple search tool, which would only be able to search for results based on one of these queries at a time.
2. Chatbots return targeted information
The NLP engine removes the guesswork. Thanks to its interpretation of the user's question, a chatbot can return the information it knows to be most relevant.
In my example above, the knowledge base returned 152 results for 'how do I log in?' because it simply didn't know how to interpret my question. So, it threw everything it has at me and hoped for the best.
Chatbots don't need this 'spray and pray' approach. They interpret the question and return what is most relevant.
It is also capable of highlighting the precise information required on a page which may include other, irrelevant information, which would still need to be skimmed through after a regular search. Which brings us to our next point.
3. Chatbots can handle follow-ups
Sure, the introduction of technology has made seeking knowledge much easier, but what about the socially interactive aspect? Finding the answer to your question might bring about more questions than you started with.
The conversational nature of talking to a chatbot means that more questions can be asked as though you’re chatting with the most knowledgeable expert in the world!
The ability to interact with a chatbot through a messaging application, just as you would with a friend, makes accessing information easier than ever.
How to implement a chatbot for your knowledge base
So, you're sold on the idea. How do you make it happen?
The most important step is to make sure that your knowledge base is up to scratch and ready to be transplanted into the brain of a chatbot. This is quite often the first job we do with a new client.
You want to focus on:
- Bringing your FAQs up to date. It isn’t helpful if a chatbot starts giving out incorrect answers to users’ questions.
- Making sure you have an answer for all FAQs. Talk to your service reps. Is there anything missing?
- Digging through some data (if available). What do people look for? What should you prioritise? Which FAQs are most frequently visited? This is a big and important job, as it informs your chatbot development roadmap. You will most likely find the low-hanging fruit you can start with as well as the biggest bang for your buck.
Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to enquire about chatbot development services.
Conclusion
Supplementing your knowledge base with a conversational chatbot increases its usefulness.
At the very least, an FAQ chatbot makes your knowledge base more accessible. It eliminates the clunky nature of an FAQ search tool by pinpointing relevant information and presenting it in an easy-to-digest manner.
This allows the user to waste less time searching for the knowledge they require and more time actioning it.
A knowledge base chatbot gives your customers the gift of time (oh, and accurate answers).
Want to learn more? Grab the webinar recording!
