AI-Driven Customer Experiences are the Future of Knowledge Management
Data Doesn’t Mean Just Text
Data includes videos and images and voice. Data includes behaviors and charts. Employees and customers alike should be able to find what they need. That may mean typing “speech where the CEO talked about diversity initiatives” and getting back an audio file of the all-hands meeting. For retail, it could even mean searching for a repeat customer’s purchase history based on facial recognition when they entered the store.
Systems need to understand, curate, and search more than just text.
The System Should Get Better with Age
Most knowledge management systems are awful even after deployment. Many of them degrade with age: the ontology breaks down, user requirements change, the resources that sat around all day tagging things go and find jobs where they don’t have to sit around all day tagging things. Teams change. Someone retires. Entropy takes over.
The future of knowledge management is systems that watch and learn how users search and access information, so they can automatically improve and get more precise over time. Self-learning systems understand the data better as time goes on. The ontologies sort themselves out and cluster related data together automatically. They understand their users better and better to the point that they can predict what the user will likely ask for next.
The First Step: Acknowledging You Have a Problem
But first: Stop the madness. If you’ve got a committee of people endlessly cataloging and curating data, make them stop. Instead, they should figure out how to automate the process employing modern AI tools to teach the system how to finish the job.
Release search from the search box so every UI can provide the best possible answers in the best possible context. If I’m in a CRM or support ticket system, I should be looking at the customer’s picture and their last few orders.
If you’re deploying yet another closed system with its own search functionality that doesn’t integrate data in context, stop that too. Bring your data together. Bring your user interfaces together into a fully integrated customer experience. Provide a much better UX and watch as productivity increases with happier employees and customers.