Last time I got all excited in writing here on the TS blog, we were speaking about our new knowledge base — the way that it answers queries with short, simple articles that are easy to digest, that solve singular problems that you’re having trouble with in Synergy and then provides further learnings where there’s opportunity to. Cool beans.
Now we’ve deployed a piece of machine-learning, artificial intelligence, that helps customers to resolve their queries without having to speak to us or wait for us to respond. Our bouncing baby help bot!
This piece of AI, which is called answer-bot, is built on the Zendesk platform, and it’s a piece of software that learns how our knowledge base operates and what its purpose is. Then, when customers contact us — either out of hours when there isn’t a support team available, or when they get in touch with us via email and normally wait for us to get back — this clever kid, presents our clever customers with what it deems to be the most likely knowledge base articles to resolve their queries. Nyaw, clever little bot.
We’re proud as punch of this little tyke, but there are a few things to note:
- Answer-bot is a robot and it’s not designed to take over the human interaction that we all crave and helps us to delve deeper into business problems
- Its purpose is to enable you to get an immediate answer to a quick, simple question, instead of spending three minutes sending us the query and then waiting for an hour for us to come back to you with an answer
- This will empower you to then get on with your work, essentially — boom!
Answer-bot is still a baby. It learns over time and we’re going to invest a lot of time in helping it learn, like any good parent — we’re teaching it where it’s made mistakes in terms of what advice it offers, and also confirming and reinforcing when it’s done the right thing and helped someone solve their query.
For us, the overall purpose of this is to be able to spend as much time as we can on the support enquiries that hold the maximum value for you, our customers. So that, when you need best-practice advice on things like:
- Setting up your organization
- A complex rates question because you’re changing your rates for the financial year
- Advice on how you might do that to minimize impact on your projects in the meantime
we have the time to make sure we can spend our time with you taking you through that step-by-step and make sure that it adds the most value.
Conversely, when you want to know:
- How to modify a project template
- How to cancel an invoice
- How to reuse the invoice number of the invoice you just cancelled
then the purpose of answer-bot is to give you that information easily, quickly, right into your inbox — so you can read its message, mark the query cleared and solved, and then move on to the things that are more pressing.
We’re still raring to happily take your enquiry and give you the support where we can. This beautiful bot is just designed to, where possible and where simple, get you back to work.
