Augmenting the customer experience with KM, AI, and community

Exceptional knowledge management fuels a myriad of business operations and processes, propelling them toward efficiency and success. Namely, in the realm of customer experience, KM plays a significant role, enabling and driving customer loyalty and overall organizational success.

KMWorld’s webinar, Top KM Strategies For Optimizing Customer Experience through AI, highlighted the perspectives of experts from Verint in regard to upleveling both internal and external experiences with the transformative power of AI, covering both emerging tools and trending techniques.

John Chmaj, senior director, KM strategy, Verint, began by illustrating the top customer service knowledge challenges present in today’s organizations which include:

• Too many “middlemen” between internal policy/procedure/manuals and specific customer queries and needs
• Only seconds to find the right answer
• Need content that customers can understand and act on
• Need to support multiple support channels, such as self-service and IVA tools, chat and email, and assisted service via agent desktops and CRM systems, with varying expertise and expectations
• Customers are increasingly resistant to any additional effort beyond asking a question
• May be in a highly outsourced, high turnover business with no time to develop expertise

With these obstacles in mind—coupled with unintuitive search, irrelevant information, a lack of confidence in knowledge tools, and more—“it is no surprise that knowledge delivery can be very challenging,” said Chmaj.

Ultimately, to rectify these challenges, knowledge must be harvested and curated across the business for quick access and consumption. This information must be easily findable and consumable, available in the context of the user’s journey, and continuously updated in a logical, efficient, and value-focused fashion.

As AI applies to these tasks, Chmaj offered the following as methods for implementation:

• More granular content ingestion with slicing, vectorization, and pre-processing
• Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for synthesizing search results into targeted answers
• Capture and deliver context dynamically to automatically scope and personalize searches
• Pull AI-enabled knowledge through to IVA/chat tools to widen response capabilities
• Incorporate knowledge into co-pilot tools to deliver “on-demand knowledge”
• Integrate KM systems into other solutions, such as CRM, web, quality, and community solutions

Verint manages this intersection between customer service, KM, and AI with its open, best-of-breed CX automation platform designed to deliver strong business outcomes through the power of AI. Capable of connecting to any CRM or contact center technology, Verint’s platform drives a more comprehensive understanding of CX (customer experience) and EX (employee experience) while streamlining and automating various processes with Verint Da Vinci AI and Data Hub.

Part of the platform’s utility is its ability to increase agent capacity, enabling a team of agent and enterprise bots designed to augment the human workforce. Verint offers over 40 modular agent bots, capable of inhabiting a wide array of roles, from call risk scoring to performance coaching, knowledge suggestion, knowledge automation, self-service transfer, data insights, intent discovery, and more.

Verint “allows you to roll out additional AI capabilities, apply them to particular use cases and flows across solutions, and still manage them in a consistent way,” Chmaj explained.

The intelligent knowledge delivery bot, for example, connects users to their knowledgebases with concise, direct responses to their queries. Underpinned by Verint Da Vinci AI, the bot analyzes top search results, delivers content objects filtered by scoring for relevancy, and presented with evidence-based reasoning to mitigate hallucinations.

The benefits of implementing Verint’s agents are expansive, from improving CX by reducing user effort and simplifying procedures to lowering overall costs and easing management, according to Chmaj.

Jon Allen, vice president GTM strategy, Verint, focused on the utility of community in the space of KM. While contact centers and self-service web portals certainly aid in knowledge delivery, user-initiated web groups that facilitate community conversations are a massive player in KM. Tapping into this phenomenon, according to Allen, poses a unique advantage for an organization’s KM strategy.

Creating a space for user communities, as opposed to a user-initiated space, empowers enterprises with the magic of knowledge sharing already happening outside of the organization’s walls. Offering a place for open discussion and Q&A forums, where answers can be verified and marked as trustworthy, not only boosts knowledgebases but expands the knowledge pool available to the contact center. These discussions can be mined and captured to fuel KM flows, blending curated knowledge from experts with the knowledge being created within the community, Allen explained.

This is only a snippet of the Top KM Strategies For Optimizing Customer Experience through AI webinar. To view the full webinar, featuring more detailed explanations, demonstrations, a Q&A, and more, you can view an archived version of the webinar here.