How to Deliver a Winning Online Community Experience with Cognitive Search

Your customers talk. And while you might now always like what they say about you, these discussions do happen. It could be a seasoned user sharing some handy tips from experience or a newbie who wants to learn how different features work.

An online community gives people the space to engage in such conversations while keeping you in the loop. Being a part of the interactions enables you to listen closely to new ideas, opinions, and use cases. This helps to keep the customers’ needs at the center.

So, build an online community and rejoice, right? If only it were that easy! Communities don’t always work. But why is that? Well, blame the world wide web.

People have now got accustomed to connected and hyper-personalized experiences. Online communities are no exception to that. They need to offer relevant content that is tailored to every user’s needs. Needless to say, it can be challenging. Here’s how AI can help.

Empowering Customers to Self-Serve

Emerging technologies like cognitive search engines leverage AI & its building blocks to fulfill those expectations at scale. And it begins the moment a member enters the community.

1. Personalizes the Home Page for Every User

When a customer logs into the community, the first thing they see is a highly customized home page. The engine taps their profile, behavioral, and historical data to provide easy access to topics they’ve expressed interest in previously. AI also uses this information to accurately predict what the customers might be interested in next and add it to the page.

2. Makes Search Box Your Customers’ MVP

Once the users get searching, natural language understanding (NLU) and machine learning come into play. Together, they fuel a myriad of features like autocomplete and auto-suggestions. This reduces customer effort and helps elevate the community experience.

Additionally, it can be connected to multiple repositories like the help center, documentation portal, FAQs, LMS, etc. This enables brands to provide seamless access to all the helpful information from the community search interface.

3. Drives Knowledge Discovery on Results Page

To err is human. And these mistakes often find their way to the search queries. This is where a cognitive search solution taps in features like ‘did you mean’ and intelligent spellcheck to ensure minor typos don’t mar the community experience.

It then organizes the results based on their customer lifecycle stage, past searches, purchase history, etc. This brings the most relevant pieces to the top and drives engagement. The engine also understands brand jargon and can identify synonyms used in their lieu. If the customers are not happy with the results, they can resort to faceted search and drill down with ease.

4. Leverages Conversational AI that Refrains from Canned Responses

It’s no secret that modern consumers love to chat. So, why not deploy a chatbot on the community as well? While it doesn’t sound like the most innovative idea, we’re not talking about the usual, scripted chatbots with limited scope.

The next-gen bots, equipped with NLG and machine learning, have arrived. This enables them to go beyond the script, understand intent, and then frame a fitting response. They’re powered by the cognitive engine and can access all the helpful content.

They also tap into search insights to ensure they’ve zeroed in on the right answer. And if they can’t find the right answer, they start a new community discussion or thread on the user’s behalf. Pretty handy, right?

Augmenting Agent Experience with AppExchange

Cognitive search doesn’t just help customers in the community but also the agents who respond to their threads. And there are a number of ways it does that.

AI-Powered AppExchange Apps

Cognitive engines power an array of purposeful applications. Let’s take a look at some of them:

• Community Helper: Sometimes, a query comes in when most of the members are inactive. This happens a lot with global enterprises. In such cases, the post remains unanswered for a while before being assigned to agents. Cognitive search powers a bot that tracks all incoming posts. If a post doesn’t garner any response in a stipulated time, the bot steps in. It understands the message and then frames a sentiment-adaptive answer. As a result, members always find answers on the community and start using it regularly.
• Agent Helper: More often than not, issues are assigned to agents with only the customer-provided description. And they respond accordingly. The more insights they have, the better will be their response. This is where apps like Agent Helper can make an impact. It analyzes the case and populates relevant information for agents like top articles, related cases, top agents, and customer journey. This helps boost FCR as well as MTTR.
• Escalation Predictor: Sometimes, things are beyond the control of an agent. No matter how hard they try, escalation is inevitable. It is paramount to triage them carefully and personalize the interaction. Cognitive search helps you with that. Escalation Predictor looks at indicators like customer sentiment and the type of issue to predict the odds of an escalation. This prepares the agents to interact better and pass the baton to the right agent if need be.

Want to Ameliorate Self-Service Success and Elevate Agent Experience on Your Salesforce Org?

When it comes to redefining customer and employee experiences, cognitive search has an invaluable role to play, and nothing mirrors that better than the success story of Idaptive, a leading Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) provider. Leveraging Salesforce Service Cloud for agent productivity plus a customer community powered by Salesforce Community Cloud to drive self-service, Idaptive was able to achieve a CSAT score of 92%, boost agent productivity by 15%, and much more.

Read the complete success story of Idaptive’s journey to improving customer satisfaction and case resolution in this blog post, check out the spotlight here, and visit SearchUnify on the AppExchange.