How AI Can Transform Contact Centers’ Unstructured Content

If your organization is drowning in unstructured content, it’s not alone. IDC predicts 80% or more of global content and data will be unstructured by 2025. Most businesses understand there’s a lot of value lurking in their unstructured content, but they struggle with how to process it efficiently.

Forward-thinking organizations are now using AI advances in knowledge management, computing and software technology to take full advantage of the insights and wisdom contained in unstructured content. These new AI-driven knowledge management solutions are allowing them to extract more value from their unstructured content and automate many of the situations that require human input and handling.

For an organization with a multichannel contact center, these advanced technology solutions can fundamentally change the center’s role, transforming it from a basic service to a strategic differentiator.

Unstructured Versus Structured Content

The average business has tons of unstructured content: emails, PDFs, documents, basic website content, audio, video and more. In essence, unstructured content is any content that can’t fit neatly in a knowledge base. It doesn’t adhere to any semantics and rules and doesn’t fit into specific sequences or formats. The two most significant challenges to working with unstructured content are:

• It can’t be integrated into existing information systems.

• It can’t be easily processed by traditional automation solutions.

Even if your organization has a well-organized knowledge base, it doesn’t mean it’s properly structured. This can be a problem when you need relevant information quickly. A major obstacle to fully utilizing unstructured content is that it currently requires a lot of human judgment and decision-making. Manually processing enormous amounts of unstructured content can lead to issues like high operations costs, long turnaround times and high error incidences.

Traditional solutions to unstructured content focus on rule- or template-based methods. But they’re expensive to implement and time-consuming to maintain. To effectively automate unstructured content processes, you need more specialized tools to make the content accessible, searchable and relevant.

AI Solution To Unstructured Content

AI solutions can interface with your existing software to process unstructured content and integrate it into your workflow. You’re then equipped to automate tasks and derive true value out of unstructured content. Though helpful for any industry, these solutions are particularly of great benefit to the healthcare, financial services, banking industries as well as government entities where document processing spans entire value chains.

Automating unstructured content processes doesn’t require a full-blow IT overhaul. Here’s how you can use AI-driven tools in different organizational processes:

• Self-service tools are easy to implement and provide cognitive workflow automation and let you deal with most complex unstructured content processes.

• AI automation tools allow for handling specialized complex processes.

• Machine learning solutions help give structure to unstructured content but, since they generally lack a workflow builder feature, aren’t able to automate end-to-end workflows.

• Intelligent RPAs (robotic process automation) incorporate AI capabilities into their process automation solutions. They require no coding, and their affordability, error tolerance and customization options allow them to address complex multistage unstructured content processes.

The right knowledge management solutions provider can help your organization implement digital transformation processes and tailor intelligent automation solutions to your specific needs.

Unstructured Content And Call Centers

When organizations use data to analyze customer preference and habits, it’s often the structured kind that’s considered. But while contact center KPI and sales data provide valuable information, they do little to help companies understand their customers’ feelings and expectations. It’s unstructured data that contains those crucial insights.

The information available from email messages, social media comments, call center transcripts, chat transcripts, blog comments and review websites can help agents provide a superior customer experience.

• Emails, which 50% of customers say is their favorite channel, often reveal common customer concerns and how effectively agents handle similar issues.

• Social media and blog comments are especially popular with younger customers. What they share helps organizations better understand their brand’s reputation and helps discover frequently used keywords.

• Call and chat transcripts can be used in agent training to improve interpersonal skills and shorten response times.

• Review websites are known for their blunt, often negative customer comments. They’re a great source for learning which products and services customers love and which need more work.

While there’s no denying structured content can reveal key information about your practices and numbers, also analyzing and utilizing unstructured content helps you adopt a customer-centric attitude that focuses on what your customers want.

Meeting The Challenges Head-On

Launching a successful AI-based KM solution can involve overcoming some hurdles.

• Infrastructure. Data handling, storage, scaling and security are just a few of the critical components needed to deploy an AI KM solution. Successful implementation starts with understanding how suitable your infrastructure environment is to support AI apps and workloads. Does it have the right mix of processing capabilities and high-speed storage? Is it flexible enough to be deployed in the cloud?

• Staff. Over 60% of workers have a positive view of the impact of AI on their work. Getting your employees to that level of acceptance takes adopting new approaches to learning, training and motivating. Long-term investment in workforce skills development is key, as is identifying where training and new skills will be necessary.

• Necessity. While there are many significant benefits to AI-based KM solutions, it might not be the right solution for some organizations. For instance, if you’re trying to force an AI solution on a problem that doesn’t require it or lack the financial resources to implement it, it’s important to consider whether the investment is one worth making at this time.

AI in knowledge management can take an organization from disorganized to streamlined. When integrated with a knowledge base, it’s a powerful tool that can transform the way your organization’s information is created, managed and shared. Agents and employees can more easily collaborate, and they’re better equipped to focus on strategic planning.