The incoming flow of requests entering companies’ customer services can rapidly become overwhelming without a clear process in place. Having an FAQ section is one of the easiest ways to deal with this. However, with an increasingly growing number of questions, traditional FAQ sections are reaching their limits. Implementing an intelligent FAQ system powered by technologies such as AI or NLP can boost search results and thus push customer satisfaction to the next level.
Discover in this article why implementing a smart FAQ or knowledge management solution can help answer customer requests and strengthens brand loyalty and trust.
Frequently asked questions on FAQs
What is an FAQ page and why your company needs it?
“How sweet the perfect answer, met swiftly, clear and sound.
How bitter the foiled query, when “no results are found”.
Anonymous, 21st Century
A traditional FAQ page can be described as a support page bringing together in a single place a list of the questions most often asked by current and prospective clients. Companies usually have an FAQ page to save agents’ time, which would be otherwise spent addressing recurring customer questions. Many customer requests can be easily resolved with a short text answer and do not require direct contact with the company’s support team.
Structured in a question-and-answer format, FAQs help customers find information regarding the company’s products and services. FAQs have long been used as something of a catch-all, but companies rapidly understood the importance of having well-structured, simple, FAQs that provide efficient guidance and, thus, improve client satisfaction.
What are the limits of traditional FAQs?
Although they appear to offer a whole and tidy utility, traditional FAQs have fairly limited capabilities. They have been built to reply to questions phrased in a precise way. They are, thus, very static. On the technical side of things, traditional FAQs do not always understand the intention associated with the request. In general, this means they are not able to handily understand synonyms, words with typos, and so on.
Searching through so large amounts of potentially loosely relevant content can be very difficult for customers. Because the FAQ content is static, they may not find the precise answer that they came looking for. In the end, they may end up feeling unsatisfied, and somewhat frustrated – having found no results to what seemed a relevant question.
With 94% of companies having launched customer experience (CX) strategies, ensuring customers are at least getting the information they need should be the number one priority of any customer support department. In fact, some studies show that customer experience has nearly become more important than price and product for brand differentiation.
Empowering Customer Service with AI-Driven FAQ Software
Knowledge Management Systems vs traditional FAQ pages
No matter how extensive your traditional FAQ page is, it will never be 100% reliable, and you may want to move to a more powerful knowledge base to allow customers to answer their own questions.
A simple FAQ page focuses on the most common questions of prospects and new clients, while experienced or long-term customers will have completely different requests and concerns. They might need to access more complex content to solve their requests. FAQs briefly cover general topics, while a knowledge base works as a sort of searchable conglomeration of available information – including, of course, the answers to FAQs, but also user guides, tutorials, manuals, glossaries, or other technical documentation.
Customers can therefore browse or search a much greater breadth and depth of content than only that available in a typical FAQ. A knowledge base provides first-level help to your customers when they encounter a more challenging problem or have a more specific question. Not only can a knowledge base increase the efficiency of your customer service by reducing the number of calls, but it can also significantly improve customer trust and loyalty while reducing customer churn and abandonment.
Enhance customer experience (CX) and boost your sales
Customers are loyal to companies because of the treatment they receive, and today we are all accustomed to quick, nigh immediate, access to information. Self-service is no longer merely an option—70% of customers expect to be able to find their answers on their own, via a knowledge management system or AI chatbot, without having to contact a customer service department.
Thus, when you give your customers the ability to solve their own problems faster, you make them happy, and we’ve known for a long time that happy customers come back and spend more. The results are more sales, more trust, and maybe even product or brand advocacy, as they are more likely to tell their friends about your brand.
The incredible power of intelligent FAQ Software using Symbolic AI and NLP
Many companies have started to use knowledge bases to power their FAQ sections. This means that users will not only find a list of the most typical questions, but they will be able to browse all content from the same section. The idea is to cover the needs of different users that might be at different stages of the journey.
Choosing the right knowledge base (KB) or intelligent FAQ software to power the self-serve experience on your site is critical. While some KBs are simply indexed encyclopedias, others are powered by artificial intelligence. The type of AI technology that powers an intelligent FAQ has an impact on its main performance metric: the quality of the results provided.
A knowledge base or intelligent FAQ, or even a chatbot with robust natural language processing is able to respond to customers with an extremely high success rate by virtue of its ability to understand misspelled or fragmented queries, going beyond a simple keyword-based FAQ to the divine user intent with greater specificity. All of this translates into a better customer experience and therefore builds customer trust towards your brand.
Inbenta utilizes its patented natural language processing and 11+ years of research and development to create and implement AI-driven FAQ software and chatbots with an industry-leading self-service rate of greater than 90 percent.
Here is an example of what you can get thanks to Inbenta’s intelligent FAQ Software:
Now that you have a grasp of the benefits of AI-Driven FAQ Software, you might be interested in our eBook that will teach you in greater detail how to build an efficient knowledge base.
