Posted on by Stephane Lissillour

Video Killed the Radio Stars but Have Chatbot Killed Knowledge Management Systems?

As most of tools existing for quite a while, Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) were recently challenged by tools that looked more dynamic and more adapted to current tech trends: CHATBOT for example were expected to take over the support of clients having all kind of questions & queries.

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After a few years of hype, where do we stand?

Facts:

Let’s look at the bright side first:

  • Yes, CHABOT are up and running 7 days a week
  • Yes, CHABOT can address some easy to ask and easy to analyse queries. It is important to note that those queries have to be easy ones – means the customer have to ask those queries in a very simple manner, so the bot replying, will not get lost with too many words …

BUT

Facts again:

Studies shown that users don’t like to get support from bots (and very probably it is because they could not get proper answers from them…) Recent studies (ie study from Statista.com) found that the huge majority of customers (rough average 80%) prefer human interaction to AI driven interfaces as chatbot.

More studies forecast that bot assistants lacking integration with Knowledge Systems will NOT bring the expected CS and savings.

Very few businesses require 24/7 replies on queries, and when there is a critical need (health, security, financial transactions for instance) most of the time it is low volume and high quality required so human interfaces have to be there.

So KMS seems to be considered as the fundamental foundation which should not be neglected for both human and virtual Customer Support.

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Knowledge Management: a fundamental element that is here to stay?

No surprise that some other studies shows that KM has a bright future to help and support human beings (but not only) to reply accurately and consistently to queries from other precious human beings: customers and prospects.

Gartner found that 74% of Customer Support Professionals mentioned improving knowledge and content to their customers and employees as a priority.

There is a spot for bots and probably in the forthcoming years, technology will evolve so the current rejection could reduce. But we also need to consider that robots need to be fed, and when they’ll be working better, they’ll need to use some fundamental pieces of knowledge, and they’ll find in your KMS.

The days IA/Bots/ML will create their own knowledge (and mimic the current knowledge life cycle and workflow: identification of need, authoring, validating, monitoring, improving, and managing obsolescence…) are not there yet. And when it will happen, we’ll still have to ensure that 2 different lines of code would not generate 2 different solutions to similar queries just because some synonyms were used…

Some advices from the Customer Support Experts at SHA:

  • Start today with a KMS solution that will enable you to create, maintain and monitor your enterprise knowledge for your contact center staff as well as for your digital virtual agents, today and tomorrow!
  • Video might have killed the video stars some years ago (same as streaming has killed some others) but LPs are still there and Chatbot did not killed KMS, just made their existence more critical and more visible…
  • If you need to set up a KMS from scratch or move your existing KMS to a much more agile and cost-efficient system, have a look at what SHA can provide you!

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