How to Build a Powerful Knowledge Base Chatbot for Smarter Customer Support

Imagine if there was a way to help more customers with fewer agents. Well, we’ve got some good news.

Many businesses implement chatbots for customer service and sales, usually installed on their websites, to answer customer questions and provide improved support.

The thing is, chatbots need data to work properly. A chatbot on its own will not be able to help your customers most effectively. Integrating a chatbot with your knowledge base is the way to offer outstanding support to your customers, enabling it to be able to draw from your content and deliver intelligent answers.

This requires building your chatbot and knowledge base to make them an unstoppable resource for your customers. We’ll walk you through each step necessary to successfully build your knowledge base chatbot and discuss several best practices to ensure optimum support. 

What Are Knowledge Base Chatbots?

A knowledge base chatbot is a computerized system that interacts with customers through simulating human-like conversation. Powered by AI, your chatbot integrates with your knowledge base to surface relevant content and provide answers to customers conversing with the bot.

AI agents go one step further than traditional chatbots. Rather than simply finding and sharing relevant articles from the knowledge base, they use generative AI to offer context-rich summaries of answers and provide a more advanced model of self-service as a next-generation AI agent.

Knowledge-base chatbots ultimately connect with the content of your knowledge base to help customers without requiring the intervention of an agent. The more content you have, and the more data your AI agent has been trained on, the better the answers your chatbot can offer to customers. The more diverse your source data, the more intelligent your knowledge-base chatbot will be. 

The chatbot is a more dynamic way to interact with the knowledge base, can ask follow-up questions if the input is unclear, and escalate the interaction to a support agent if necessary.

Benefits Of Knowledge Base Chatbots

• Provides quick, accurate, 24/7 responses – with the best will in the world, your agents are busy, and any technology that can assist with self-service will elevate your support strategy. Knowledge-base chatbots provide fast and accurate responses at any time of day – even when agents have clocked out. Customers appreciate these timely responses.
• Improves efficiency in customer service – customer service is more efficient when using knowledge-base chatbots. Instead of having to pick up the phone and wait on hold, customers can simply type their question into the knowledge base chatbot (such as Eddy AI) and then be on their way.
• Lowers support costs with automation – implementing a single chatbot can massively lower support costs versus hiring more agents. By automating simple queries, your support team can help more customers without increasing headcount. Just like having a knowledge base contributes to self-service, automating customer service with a knowledge base chatbot is an easy way to keep support costs under control.
• Easy setup, no training required – if you choose the right knowledge base chatbot, the setup is simple and doesn’t require any training to get started. For example, you can configure Eddy AI chatbot in Document360, and it will start running on your chosen knowledge base and helping customers with just a few clicks.

Steps To Build A Knowledge Base Chatbot

• Define clear business goals and objectives – first, decide what you want to accomplish with your AI chatbot. Do you want to shorten support queues, provide self-service for customers, or generate more leads? Perhaps it’s some combination of possible answers. This will help you decide which knowledge base chatbot is right for you.
• Choose the right AI-powered knowledge base platform – there are knowledge bases out there that offer sophisticated chatbot capabilities, like Document360’s Eddy AI. If you’re already using Document360 and you’re on the right plan, it’s a simple matter of setting up a knowledge base chatbot on your knowledge base. Eddy AI will draw from your knowledge base to provide intelligent customer answers.
• Identify and organize key knowledge base content – make sure the right knowledge base articles are available for your chatbot to learn from, so that when customers ask common questions the knowledge base has the answer. If you don’t know where to start, think of commonly asked questions, or FAQs, that will be excellent data to feed to your knowledge base chatbot.
• Ensure seamless integration with the chatbot – set up your knowledge base properly so that it is fully integrated with your chatbot. Follow the instructions of your particular knowledge base chatbot provider so that your chatbot can instantly start learning from your knowledge base.
• Optimize chatbot tone and language for user engagement – take your chatbot for a test run and make sure it matches the tone of your organization, making adjustments if necessary to optimize it. Try beating the chatbot so you can see where you need to create content.
• Continuously test, refine, and update the knowledge base – as your business grows and customer demands change, it’s imperative to constantly work on the knowledge base to ensure it stays business-relevant. Check failed searches in your knowledge base analytics to find areas for creating new content.

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Knowledge Base Chatbot Best Practices

• Use a clear, keyword-rich title – the title is just one of the parts of your article that your chatbot will use to search the knowledge base, so keep it simple and use the main keywords relating to your article content. If your article is about printing an invoice, make sure you insert this keyword phrase directly into the title.
• Use proper tags – In Document360, Eddy AI can suggest alternative tags you can use to enrich the metadata for your knowledge base articles. Tags are another method that your chatbot can use to find relevant articles and return them to your users for a powerful self-service experience.
• Customize your slug – make sure your slug is well-constructed so that your chatbot can search your slug along with the rest of your article (the slug is the last part of your URL for that unique page). Use keywords and dashes to separate each word so that your chatbot can “read” your slug.
• Write for humans first – don’t think too much about the knowledge base chatbot when writing your content. Write content that will appeal to your customers and feel like it comes from a fellow human. Don’t worry too much about being too wordy – if you’re using Document360 you can automatically summarize long articles with Eddy AI for easy reference.
• Monitor and optimize your AI agent for continuous improvement – once you’ve launched your chatbot, use the feedback mechanisms (available in Document360) to check how well-received its answers are by your customers. Don’t set it and forget it – find areas you can improve to continuously develop your self-service strategy.

How Do You Provide AI Chatbot Access To Your Knowledge Base?

• Data connectors (connect Eddy to external sources—tools) are software components that determine whether or not data can be transferred or integrated with different systems, in this case, allowing Eddy AI access to your knowledge base.
• Knowledge source connectors (external source—text data) allow you to integrate various external and internal sources, such as websites, with knowledge platforms to generate answers from a wider range of information.
• Access control index & no-index) Permission control from external sources: The security mechanisms that determine whether the AI chatbot can have access to sensitive data or systems.

Top Chatbot Integrations For Your Knowledge Base

Without a knowledge base integrated with your chatbot, it will lack the ability to answer customer questions. When you integrate your knowledge base, your chatbot is empowered to answer basic customer questions by serving relevant content.

Here are some of the best chatbot integrations to enhance your knowledge base:

Intercom and Document360

Intercom is a conversational and messenger-based business solution provider. It’s a SaaS product that enables effective communication with customers using chatbots, live messaging, and much more. Intercom comes built in with a Resolution Bot which is a chatbot that accelerates resolution times for customers, even if your support team is busy or offline. 

We have designed Document360 in a way where third-party extensions like Intercom can be configured by the users without any complexity. You can use Intercom with Document360 to provide real-time support for your website users by searching for and sharing articles (link or article content) from your Document360 knowledge base within the Intercom chat box.

Drift and Document360

Drift is a conversational messenger platform that you can add to your website, knowledge base, or online business. Drift comes with custom chatbots that you can use to engage website visitors in seconds with specific messages and interactions for every visitor. Drift also offers AI chatbots that let you engage and qualify every site visitor, no matter where they land on your site. 

Integrating your Document360 powered knowledge base with the Drift chat application gives you an additional edge when providing support or answering queries for your customers. You can share relevant articles and information from your knowledge base without having to leave the Drift conversation page.

Combining Drift with your knowledge base is a good way to offer support to your customers, saving a lot of time and effort. 

LiveChat and Document360

LiveChat is powerful software that lets you communicate with your customers. Let chatbots generate leads, create help tickets, and chat across channels.  Greet customers and quickly route chats with the help of AI. Automatically segment visitors based on what they do on your site so you can better meet their needs. 

You can integrate your Document260 knowledge base with LiveChat’s live chat software and use their chatbots to converse with your customers. 

Freshdesk Messaging and Document360

Freshdesk Messaging (formerly Freshchat) enables you to deliver on customer expectations using the latest in conversational messaging and AI-powered bots. See all messages from customers in one place, wherever it comes from – in-app chat, website chat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, iMessage and more. Support customers across messaging apps and devices. 

Build once and deploy chatbots on all messaging apps and devices. Answer questions, guide customers to resolution, and gracefully escalate to an agent – all done automatically. 

Document360 integrates seamlessly with Freshdesk Messaging so you can take advantage of its AI-powered chatbots to answer questions from your customers. 

Olark and Document360 

Olark combines a live chat tool with customer data collection to help you improve your communication with users. Use Olark with Document360 to customize and manage your customers’ live chat experience. CoPilot is Olark’s chatbot that doesn’t replace your agent, it assists them. If it gets stuck, it calls for help. When your agents are free to take over, they can grab the wheel and own the conversation. This is a chatbot that keeps your people in control.

Document360 integrates with Olark so you can benefit from its full chatbot capabilities and help your customers when they need it most. 

Kommunicate and Document360

Kommunicate is an all-in-one platform to automate customer support using chatbots and live chat. Build AI chatbots without code, generate more leads, and be available 24/7 to improve customer experience – give your customers the best of AI with a human touch.

You can benefit from a simple, intuitive, and easy-to-use interface wrapped over powerful conversational AI. Make NLP-powered support bots and conversational workflows without any code. Create bots that can qualify leads, schedule meetings, and/support your customers 24/7. 

Document360 integrates with Communicate so you can quickly hand off your customers to relevant knowledge base articles that help with their problems. 

Crisp and Document360

Crisp is an all-in-one multichannel messaging platform that connects companies and customers. You can take advantage of their chatbot builder which comes with a visual editor so you can create workflows through their no-code builder. Simply hit “publish” and your scenario is live, ready to help your company to scale unlimited, personalized conversations 24/7. 

Document360 integrates with Crisp so you can have your knowledge base articles recommended to customers quickly and efficiently.

Also read: Chatbots Vs. Knowledge Bases: Choose the Ideal Support Tool

Final Remarks

Knowledge-base chatbots are a growing way for businesses to support their customers, provide 24/7 help, alleviate stress on their support teams, and save money. As long as you have the right data, chatbots are an intelligent way to interact with customers and offer the answers they seek in a fraction of the time it would take to communicate with the support team.

Whether you are using a traditional knowledge-base chatbot or a next-generation AI agent, these tools are an effective solution for customer self-service. When you provide your chatbot with helpful content and train it to answer common customer queries, the result is a win-win for the business and its customers.

An intuitive knowledge base software to easily add your content and integrate it with any application. Give Document360 a try!

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