Leveraging AI and automation to accelerate client support and prevent institutional knowledge loss
Overview
Our client is one of Australia’s leading school management platform providers. With a growing client base of over 3,000 schools throughout Australia using its platform, they provide technical support to hundreds of clients every week. How quickly and effectively they do that directly impacts both their clients’ operational efficiency and their own, so both hinge on making information readily and instantly available to support staff.
Seeking to streamline its support processes and reduce response times, the client approached Antares for an innovative and scalable solution to replace its multi-platform stack.
Since implementing QBot, the client has recorded a range of benefits, including but not limited to those which it set out to achieve: building an intelligent, centralised knowledge base and improving the speed and quality of its client support services.
The Problem
Legacy ticketing system and workflow was slowing down client support services
While a people-focused approach to support – whereby IT support staff triaged client questions to the subject matter experts (SMEs) best qualified to answer them – ensured that support was thorough and effective once delivered, efficiency was taking a hit.
With SMEs outnumbered by daily support tickets, but essential to responding to and acting on many of them, a backlog of support queries was slowing both our client’s support team, and the clients they serve, down.
This legacy workflow saw quick response ‘how-to’ questions go unanswered for as long as the complex support queries awaiting SME input, and had no mechanism to record the answers in the knowledge base.
Though secondary to improving efficiency and response times, the goal of retaining valuable institutional knowledge and making it quickly and easily available in a centralised knowledge base became a core objective – and outcome – of using aleX. Without a central repository of knowledge, SMEs were acting as human silos of information about the platform and its modules – many of which are designed by the SMEs themselves.
Where it had previously operated with a multi-tool and multi-platform stack, the limited efficiency of its legacy ticketing system, along with the broader rise of integrated, cloud-native solutions, had our client seeking a trusted partner in a game-changing rollout.
The Solution
Antares leverages QBot to fast-track support and knowledge retention with AI
Compelled to act fast when Covid-19 lockdowns threatened to disperse staff and cause company-wide delays, the client engaged Antares to deliver a solution to their key challenges. Antares worked closely with the client to implement aleX with additional customisations to ensure alignment with their operations, goals and existing technology stack.
With the primary goals of streamlining client support services and establishing a solid, easily available knowledge base to prevent the loss of valuable institutional knowledge, the Antares team knew that QBot was the perfect fit.
QBot is a Digital Learning Assistant designed to help institutions accelerate support processes and knowledge base development effortlessly. QBot automates responses to common questions by recording questions and answers in a centralised, self-building knowledge base.
By automatically generating FAQs from recorded support conversations and Q&As, QBot also frees the previously overburdened support team from manually creating and updating FAQs.
The creation of a centralised knowledge base has served to both powerfully mitigate against institutional knowledge loss and enhance the quality of support that staff are able to provide. The valuable information previously only stored in SME’s brains is now quickly and easily available to staff. And, by recording the whole conversation – including client, support staff and SME input - QBot helps support staff gain context around how a question was answered.
Along with mechanisms for adding phrase and verbiage variations to Q&A pairs, this serves to improve and accelerate knowledge base development.
The Results
An intelligent solution that streamlines support operations and prevents knowledge loss
Since going live four months ago, QBot has already more than tripled the number of Q&A pairs in the client’s knowledge base from 400 to 1500. That number is increasing by over 100 questions per week, becoming more intuitive with every addition.
The benefits have extended beyond what our client initially envisioned. Through implementing QBot, the institution has recorded an array of key benefits:
- Faster support turnaround, so clients get answers faster
- Automatically adds FAQs so clients needn’t submit tickets for them, freeing up staff to address more complex queries thoroughly
- Self-building knowledge base that gets more intuitive with every addition
- Intelligent analytics with option to add synonyms/ phrase variations for best quality FAQs
- Eliminated risk of institutional knowledge loss
Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Clients report getting answers faster, support staff are able to fulfil their duties more effectively and efficiently, and important information can be surfaced from the knowledge base in an instant.
Going forward, our client hopes to deploy its knowledge base beyond internal staff and to its clients, eliminating the need for a middleman.
