Automate your customer support with a knowledge base chatbot

A knowledge base chatbot is a type of chatbot that's designed to provide answers to common questions customers ask, using the information available in a knowledge base—a library of organized and structured information about the business and its products and services.

Knowledge base chatbots offer a range of benefits for both businesses and end-users. Here are some of its primary advantages:

• 24/7 Availability: Knowledge base chatbots are available around the clock, allowing users to get answers at any time without waiting for human agents.
• Consistency in responses: They provide consistent answers every time, ensuring that information is uniform and as given in the chatbot knowledge base.
• Scalability: Knowledge base chatbots can handle multiple queries simultaneously, allowing businesses to cater to a large number of users without the need for proportional human resource scaling.
• Cost-efficiency: Knowledge base chatbots can reduce the need for large human customer support teams to cover multiple shifts, leading to significant support cost savings.
• Instant responses: They provide immediate answers to customer queries, reducing wait times and improving user satisfaction.
• Minimization of human errors: Since the responses are based on a structured chatbot knowledge base, the chances of the bot giving incorrect information are minimal compared to human agents who might sometimes make mistakes or be unaware of specific details.
• Data collection: Knowledge base chatbots can keep a log of user queries that can help businesses improve their services, products, their website and other collaterals, and even the knowledge base itself.
• Easy updates: The knowledge base can be easily updated to incorporate new information or make changes to existing information, ensuring that users always receive the most recent data.
• User engagement: Interactive knowledge base chatbots can improve user engagement by offering a dynamic way to access information compared to static FAQ pages.
• Reduction in repetitive support queries: By handling common and repetitive questions, knowledge base chatbots free up human agents to focus on more complex and nuanced issues.

A chatbot knowledge base is a library of resources like answers to FAQs, articles like product specifications, company policies, and terms and conditions that gives your chatbot the information it needs to answer customer queries and makes it self-sufficient.

A chatbot knowledge base is indispensable for businesses whose support relies heavily on chatbots. Without a knowledge base for chatbots to fetch answers from, all they can do is go through the pre-programmed loop and connect prospects and customers to live chat agents or create a support ticket when they encounter questions that aren't part of the chatbot program.

When connected to your knowledge base, chatbots can answer all frequently asked questions, leaving your team to focus on those that need their attention, like troubleshooting, bug fixes, or demos.

To build a knowledge base chatbot (Answer Bot) in SalesIQ, follow the steps below:

• In Zoho SalesIQ, navigate to Settings > Bots > Answer Bot. Choose the brand for which you want to enable the bot.
• Give your bot a name and description, and choose the departments you want the bot to be associated to.
• Connect the bot to your chatbot knowledge base. Follow the steps given in the next FAQ to create a chatbot knowledge base. You can also connect Answer Bot to your existing knowledge base in Zoho Desk, if you have one.
• To enhance the Answer Bot's functionality, you can enable the "Fetch answer from resource (powered by OpenAI)" option. This will help the bot respond to questions to the point by parsing through your chatbot knowledge base and fetching precise answers from articles instead of sending the entire article.
• Configure your bot response and follow-up actions for conditions like Answer found and Answer not found. You can even configure the knowledge base bot to provide related resource suggestions when the exact answer isn't found in the knowledge base.
• Define your bot's behaviour during business and non-business hours, response interval, the criteria of the audience you want the bot to assist, and operator hand-off.
• Preview and deploy your bot, and sit back and watch your knowledge base chatbot take over.

Here are the steps to create a knowledge base for your chatbot.

• Before you start building your chatbot knowledge base, you need to analyze the questions your prospects and customers frequently ask your live chat team. You can also include the most searched topics and most visited pages in your website.
• Most businesses will already have articles and blogs on these commonly asked topics and an FAQ page on their website. If you do, check if all the questions you've come up with in step 1 are covered and add them if they're not.
• If you don't have any content on these topics, drafting these articles and answers to FAQs is the next step.
• Add all these articles and FAQs into your knowledge base platform. Here's a detailed guide on bulk-importing your chatbot knowledge base content to SalesIQ.
• Connect your knowledge base with your chatbot. Your knowledge base chatbot is now ready to be deployed on your website.
• Keep your chatbot knowledge base updated by regularly adding answers to the unanswered questions recorded by your chatbot.