Knowledge base chatbots: What they are, how to build one & how they’re evolving

Knowledge base chatbots are an excellent tool for enhancing customer service while reducing operational costs. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2024, over half of consumers already prefer bot interactions for quick and immediate assistance, and this number is set to grow as bots evolve.

Customers now demand superior AI-powered experiences, rendering old knowledge base chatbots insufficient. Enter AI agents, the next generation of AI-powered bots capable of independently resolving complex customer issues. Unlike legacy knowledge base chatbots, these AI agents are experts in customer service, trained on industry-leading AI models and billions of real interactions to detect customer needs and respond like human agents.

With this advanced technology, you can build your own AI agent in minutes by connecting it to your knowledge base—no coding skills required.

Let’s dive into the specifics of knowledge base chatbots, including how they’re evolving into more intelligent AI agents.

More in this guide:

• Why you should use a knowledge base chatbot
• How to build a knowledge base chatbot
• Knowledge base chatbot best practices
• Frequently asked questions
• Go beyond traditional knowledge base chatbots with Zendesk AI agents

Why you should use a knowledge base chatbot

Bots integrated with your knowledge base can significantly enhance the service experience for customers, agents, and administrators. Here are a few key benefits:

Start within minutes, no training required

The first step to deploying a knowledge base bot is to build a comprehensive knowledge base that addresses your most frequently asked questions. If you don’t have one already, generative AI tools can expedite the creation of help center articles. For example, AI can take a few bullet points and transform it into a complete article.

With a knowledge base in place, you can launch a knowledge base bot in minutes to instantly resolve common questions. Connecting your bot to your knowledge base with the right generative AI provider is straightforward and requires just a few clicks. Once connected, the chatbot or AI agent can draw from the knowledge base to answer customer questions via messaging and email. By using generative AI, the bot can summarize answers and respond to customers in a conversational manner, enhancing the overall customer experience.

Solutions like Zendesk prioritize ease of use, simplifying the process and eliminating the need for a team of developers or the painstaking task of building dialogue flows for every scenario. As a result, virtually anyone can set up a knowledge base AI agent and start benefiting from advanced AI capabilities immediately.

Delight customers with 24/7 service in multiple languages

One of the most well-known benefits of chatbots is providing customers with instant, 24/7 support. However, this benefit only holds if your bot can effectively understand and resolve customer needs. A bot that fails to do so can lead to customer frustration.

This is where AI agents excel. AI agents are pre-trained on billions of real customer interactions, allowing them to understand the nuances of customer service and respond like human agents. With an AI agent, you can offer customers immediate assistance without compromising on the quality of the conversational experience.

Powered by generative AI, these bots deliver answers tailored to your brand’s tone of voice and can provide multilingual support even if connected to a monolingual knowledge base. Taking it a step further, you can identify topics where customers need more guidance and easily create conversation flows to guide them step-by-step to a resolution. Integrating your AI agent with backend systems, like order management or e-commerce tools, allows them to access key customer context and personalize their responses.

Scale your support without overwhelming agents

Support teams often face the dual challenge of delivering more value to customers while reducing costs, especially during surges in customer support volume. AI agents can significantly alleviate this burden.

According to our Customer Experience Trends Report 2024, 44 percent of agents state that having automated bots like AI agents handle requests allows them to do their job better.

A major benefit of knowledge base AI agents is that they can be implemented without any technical expertise. This enables your existing team to easily set up automation for their most repetitive queries, helping to clear ticket backlogs efficiently. In other words, AI agents simplify the lives of your support team, enhancing productivity and customer satisfaction simultaneously.

Future-proof your support with actionable insights

Support teams are not strangers to the necessity of making themselves resilient against the unexpected. Knowledge base AI agents automate responses and provide valuable insights that help you proactively improve and future-proof your support operations.

Here’s how you can use those insights:

• Know exactly what to automate: Intent suggestions based on your past conversation data reveal the most common customer inquiries and pain points, helping you prioritize automation efforts for maximum impact.
• Boost productivity with actionable insights reporting: Eliminate guesswork and make data-driven decisions with reports showing how your AI agent is performing, what content resonates with customers, and where you can make improvements.
• Detect issues automatically and improve service quality: Quality assurance tools can flag potential issues with your AI agent’s responses, allowing you to refine its accuracy and maintain a high level of service quality.
• Analyze CSAT responses to make targeted improvements: By analyzing customer satisfaction ratings and feedback, you can identify areas where your conversation needs refinement and ensure your AI agent consistently meets customer expectations.

Using your data allows you to continuously optimize your AI agent’s performance, stay ahead of emerging trends, and ensure your support operations remain resilient and effective in the face of evolving customer needs.

For example, Grove, a leading collaborative workspace provider, maintains a 95 percent CSAT score with a lean CX team, thanks to AI agents. These agents handle a significant portion of customer inquiries, allowing human agents to focus on complex issues and deliver personalized service. This approach improves efficiency and ensures a consistently high level of customer satisfaction, even with a smaller support team.

How to build a knowledge base chatbot

So we’ve claimed you can launch a bot in minutes without any prior coding knowledge, but now it’s time we prove it to you. Follow these simple steps, and you’re ready to make your knowledge base AI agent into another valued member of your support team.

1. Make sure your knowledge base or help center is robust and succinctly answers all your FAQS.

2. Connect your knowledge base to your generative AI provider’s API integration.

3. Try out a few test chats and make some tweaks, like setting your bot’s tone and voice to match your brand.

While a basic knowledge base chatbot is a great starting point, AI agents go beyond simple question-answering. They can understand complex inquiries, engage in natural conversations, and execute actions like processing refunds or updating account information from start to finish.

In the next section, we’ll explore how to transform your knowledge base chatbot into a sophisticated AI agent capable of handling a wider range of customer interactions and delivering truly personalized support.

Knowledge base chatbot best practices

When launching your AI agent and connecting it to your knowledge base, here are some important considerations and best practices to ensure a successful implementation:

Leverage AI to create a knowledge base

Harnessing AI and automation can streamline the process of creating and maintaining an effective knowledge base. AI-powered tools can automatically analyze incoming support tickets, identifying common questions, keywords, and trends. AI-powered knowledge base software lets you continually improve your self-service resources and deliver the most accurate and up-to-date information to your customers.

Taking it a step further, generative AI knowledge base tools from Zendesk can automatically generate knowledge base content from just a few bullet points. This speeds up content creation and ensures consistency and accuracy across your knowledge base.

Select the right AI-powered tool for exceptional CX

As the tech behind knowledge base chatbots continues to evolve, finding a solution that aligns with your specific business needs is crucial. A purpose-built AI solution ensures your chatbot understands the nuances of customer interactions and delivers exceptional support.

Here’s what to consider when selecting your AI-powered tool:

1. Purpose-built for CX: Choose an AI tool designed specifically for customer experience. This ensures your bot understands the intricacies of customer service and can effectively provide personalized and efficient support. Zendesk AI agents, for example, are trained on billions of real customer interactions, enabling them to resolve even complex issues independently.
2. Seamless integration with your team: Your AI tool should seamlessly integrate with your existing CX team, allowing for smooth escalation to human agents when needed. This ensures a consistent and positive customer experience across all touchpoints.
3. Consider how it’s trained: Zendesk AI agents come pre-trained on over 18 billion real customer interactions, giving them the expertise to resolve even complex issues independently. This extensive training allows our bots to be among the most autonomous in the industry, providing efficient and effective support without constant human intervention.
4. Easy to use yet scalable: Look for a solution that is easy to implement and doesn’t require extensive technical expertise. Your AI tool should also be able to grow with your business and customer base, adapting to your evolving automation needs.
5. Customizable and flexible: Every business has unique automation requirements. Choose a tool that offers customization options, allowing you to tailor your bot’s responses, behavior, and functionality to align with your brand’s voice and customer expectations.
6. Prioritizes security: Protecting customer data is paramount. Ensure your chosen AI tool adheres to stringent security standards and safeguards sensitive information, giving you peace of mind.

By considering these factors, you can select an AI-powered tool that enhances your customer support capabilities and delivers a seamless, efficient, and secure experience for both your customers and your team.

Monitor and optimize your AI agent for continuous improvement

Finally, continuous monitoring and optimization are essential to deliver the best customer experience possible. Leverage quality assurance (QA) tools to measure customer satisfaction, identify knowledge gaps, and ensure accuracy and consistency in your AI agent’s responses.

In addition to QA, prioritize security to protect customer data. Choose an AI platform with robust security measures in place, such as encryption and data access controls, safeguarding sensitive information, and maintaining customer trust.

Frequently asked questions

Go beyond traditional knowledge base chatbots with Zendesk AI agents

Ready to supercharge your customer support and unlock the power of AI? Go beyond traditional knowledge base chatbots with Zendesk AI agents. Zendesk AI agents are the most autonomous AI-powered bots in customer experience, capable of understanding and fully resolving even the most complex customer issues. They come pre-trained on billions of CX interactions and your conversation data, enabling them to automatically detect customer needs and respond just like human agents.

These AI agents seamlessly integrate with your knowledge base and backend systems, delivering accurate and personalized support without requiring any technical expertise. This ensures immediate value from day one. Additionally, they effortlessly scale to meet your business’s growing needs for automated resolution, enhancing efficiency and customer satisfaction as your operations expand.

Try Zendesk AI agents for free and discover how they can revolutionize your customer support strategy today.