AI and automation in marketing: The role for knowledge management

In 2018, companies invested in chatbots and self-service technologies to help their helpdesks manage the volume of customer requests they were experiencing – according to research by Forrester, 46 per cent of enterprises were investing in AI for sales and marketing, followed by 40 per cent for their customer service teams. However, these investments were typically aimed at filled specific gaps in the customer interaction, rather than being part of wider strategies around customer engagement, or CX. Yet your customer service team holds the key to not just making AI and automation campaigns work better today; they can also help make AI work more effectively into the future. This is through knowledge management. So, what is knowledge management? Knowledge management covers all the ways in which a company manages its data around customer interactions, around products, and around ways of working. From official help and support documents that are sent to customers, through to the self-help articles stored within what are called Knowledge Bases, this pool of content is useful to help customers and to help them help themselves too. Knowledge management refers to all the processes involved in creating, using and sharing that data within the business. Finally, it covers how this organisational knowledge is maintained and developed over time, so that anyone across the business – from sales, operations and marketing - can make use of it whenever they need to. For businesses with large customer support or IT service teams, knowledge management programmes should already be in place. However, they tend to be run primarily for the benefit of those teams, rather than used more widely across the whole business. They also tend not to have been developed with automated services like chatbots in mind. However, with more self-service and chatbot implementations taking place, this source of customer-focused data can be used to support those AI projects and make them more valuable.