How you can prepare your knowledge base for AI-driven customer service

PwC helps organizations enhance their customer service solutions by deploying autonomous agents like Salesforce Agentforce that can augment the capabilities of human teams, enhance decision-making and drive trusted, scalable innovation. But to achieve better results with an AI-powered customer service solution, it’s important to prepare the knowledge base it’s relying on for AI.

Key benefits of getting your knowledge base ready for AI

A knowledge base that is well-prepared for AI provides several important benefits, including:

• More precise answers
• A better user experience
• Continuous improvement and refinement
• Faster and more relevant searches
• Scalability and future-proofing

Simply put: Preparing your knowledge base can lead you to enhanced performance and better results.

Challenges in AI-driven knowledge management

If your knowledge base is outdated, relying on old or inaccurate articles as a source, it may not be ready for Agentforce. Incomplete, inaccurate or out-of-date article metadata, such as categorization, can also be an issue. If your service solution is enhanced for human agents and not AI, some content may not be intended for public consumption. Furthermore, the structure of the knowledge — table formats, images, etc. — may not be optimal for semantic search and other AI processing.

The drawbacks of an unprepared knowledge base

It’s important to address the challenges in knowledge base management because failing to update your knowledge can have a big impact on AI performance and, therefore, on customer satisfaction. For example, if the data Agentforce uses is not well prepared, the AI agent may provide an incorrect answer, which can be counterproductive and diminish customer satisfaction and trust. Failing to update your knowledge base can also increase customer service costs because it may require both AI agents and human agents to resolve an issue. This is often not a reflection of Agentforce’s limitations but rather a consequence of the quality and readiness of the knowledge it uses as its source.

Industry-leading practices and methodologies for enhancing your knowledge base

So, how do you prepare your knowledge base to help increase the performance of AI-driven customer service solutions like Agentforce? By focusing on AI readiness, content structure and metadata enrichment.

• Start with an audit and cleanup to remove outdated, duplicate or irrelevant articles and consolidate similar content for clarity and consistency. Confirm alignment with your current business processes. Leverage analytics so you can focus highly-used articles and prevent the unused ones.
• You should also standardize and enrich your content, using a combination of analytics and AI to help identify and close gaps. Consider improving metadata (titles, summaries, tags, etc.) for AI retrieval. Introduce structured elements like FAQs and step-by-step guides and define a taxonomy for key terms and synonyms.
• AI readiness scoring can be a useful part of the process as well. You can leverage pre-built prompts to score the quality of articles. Use generative AI to assess clarity, thoroughness and relevance. Try to identify any content gaps and inconsistencies during this process. Combine AI scoring with subject matter specialist assessments for high-priority articles.
• Content refinement can also be key. You want to refine articles based on AI recommendations. To help achieve this, consider rewriting key sections of your content using GenAI for better AI interpretability. Confirm your content is clear, structured and context aware. Add embedding-friendly versions of your articles in the JSON-LD format, which allows machines to better understand the content of a webpage.
• Finally, you should test and iterate. Measure retrieval effectiveness using real queries and use feedback and query logs to refine content. You should also continuously monitor, and update articles based on AI performance insights and feedback. This helps confirm effectiveness on an ongoing basis.

PwC can help accelerate your deployment of Agentforce and other AI agents with knowledge analytics, article and document refinement, AI readiness scoring and type-specific prompt templates. If you need help getting your knowledge base ready for AI, feel free to reach out.