For many enterprise organizations, the knowledge base is a cornerstone of contact center operations. Filled with critical historical and evolving information about a company’s standard operating procedures (SOP), product information, and more, it should be the primary resource agents rely on to resolve issues quickly, deliver consistent answers, and keep customers informed and satisfied.
But what happens when your knowledge base isn’t living up to those expectations – or evolving to keep pace with changes in your business and contact center technology?
In this third installment of Cresta IQ, we analyzed millions of conversations across various industries to understand the current state of enterprise knowledge bases and what the implications are when they aren’t up to par.
The data speaks for itself: many companies are struggling with a poorly maintained or incomplete knowledge base. So what are the repercussions of an undeveloped knowledge base? What can an organization do about it? And what are the best practices in conjunction with AI deployment and adoption? Let’s break it down.
Methodology: How the Gaps Were Identified
First, let’s get into exactly how we conducted the analysis, step by step:
- Conversation analysis: We examined the questions that customers frequently ask, and compared them to the content already available in each organization’s knowledge base.Important to emphasize here: we are not calculating the knowledge gap by looking at all the possible questions that could conceivably come in through the contact center. Rather, our focus here is the top, most frequently asked questions – clustered and distilled by our proprietary detection algorithms – essentially, where an organization could hope to make the biggest impact.
- Gap identification: We identified areas where the knowledge base was either insufficient to answer the question or missing a relevant entry entirely.
- Benchmarking: Companies were compared based on the volume and coverage of their knowledge bases, providing context for their current performance and areas for improvement.
A Tale of Two Knowledge Bases
Our analysis revealed that there is a wide range in the degree of effectiveness across enterprise knowledge bases. Here, I’d like to dig into the stories told by the results we found on either end of that spectrum.
As you may imagine, some organizations’ knowledge bases are woefully underdeveloped – and as a result, underutilized. In one subset of the analysis, we saw knowledge base coverage rates hovering around 10-12%. This means that, for the frequently asked questions that come into these contact centers, their existing knowledge base lacked support for nearly 90% of those customer calls.
For organizations with low coverage, this can lead to relying too heavily on training and institutional knowledge, which leads to an increase in inconsistencies, errors, and ultimately, a higher cost of agent turnover.
In comparison, in looking at another set of conversations from what we’ll term the “leaders” of this analysis, we found much higher knowledge base coverage, all hovering around 70%. Despite the fact that this coverage is quite a bit higher than our other subset, we must note that a gap of 30% in your knowledge base is still significant – and needs to be addressed.
These organizations with comparatively higher coverage have made an upfront investment in building out their knowledge base, but have trouble maintaining as the business, their customers, and their industries continue to evolve. Compounding the problem of maintenance is that many organizations have not yet optimized their knowledge content to get the most value out of it through AI.
Where are these disparities between companies coming from? Of course, there are many reasons for this, but here are two major contributing factors:
Insufficient knowledge base content
Companies who have significantly lower coverage rates often have only a fraction of the documents and resources actually needed to effectively address customer inquiries. We found that where the leaders in our analysis maintain knowledge bases with thousands of entries, others – whose coverage percentage is barely in the double digits – have fewer than 100.
This lack of depth leaves agents unequipped to handle even common questions, leading to longer resolution times, frustrated agents, and dissatisfied customers.
Lack of Full AI Enablement
Even when some knowledge base content does exist, organizations often fail to fully integrate and optimize their knowledge bases with AI tools. Without thinking through both of these critical pieces and developing a plan for deployment, the system is left unable to surface relevant answers, prioritize updates, or identify gaps effectively.
Why It Can Be So Hard to Get Right
Developing and maintaining a robust knowledge base is not as simple and straightforward as it perhaps sounds. Legacy systems often create friction in sharing and ingesting documents, and organizations also often lack a clear methodology for building their knowledge base strategically. In many cases, enterprises simply have not prioritized expansion of the knowledge base, treating it as a secondary task rather than a foundational investment.
As we all know, businesses evolve. Customer behaviors and expectations change and as a result, new topics and questions are always emerging. The only constant in a contact center is change – and so treating the knowledge base as a living resource is a key piece to maintaining its strength.
The rewards of getting it right are clear: organizations with mature knowledge bases not only close knowledge gaps but also empower their agents and AI to deliver standout customer experiences. When agents have the most current information at their fingertips, they’re able to increasingly level up their own performance and meet these changing expectations. Investing the time and resources in this process on an ongoing basis ultimately delivers improvement across the organization.
The Hidden Costs
As volume to the contact center continues to increase and customer expectations evolve, this becomes an ever-compounding problem. Failing to invest the time and resources to create and maintain a robust and AI-enabled knowledge base doesn’t just inconvenience agents – it directly impacts customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Here are just some of the pitfalls associated with overlooking the role a knowledge base plays in your contact center:
- Missed customer expectations
With less than 10% of FAQs covered, customers are left waiting for answers or receiving inconsistent information. Expect to see a hit to a wide range of critical KPIs: AHT, resolution rates, CSAT, and more. - Wasted agent time
When a company’s knowledge base isn’t properly set up and optimized, agents spend valuable minutes searching for information or escalating tickets. The contact center is already subject to extremely high agent turnover rates – recent research puts it as high as 85% for some companies – which makes relying on institutional knowledge or training incredibly risky. Without a reliable and evolving source of truth, this can lead to a frustrating and stressful experience for agents, with the potential to even further drive up attrition rates.An incomplete knowledge base also makes onboarding new agents a quick way to set them up for failure. Ramp time extends, agents are thrown into customer interactions unprepared, and frustrations run high, among your customers and your agents. - Reduced AI ROI
Without a sufficiently and properly formatted and optimized knowledge base, AI solutions won’t be able to unlock their full potential, leaving value on the table.
Building a Better Knowledge Base
If your knowledge base is underperforming, the good news is that there are actionable steps you can take to improve.
- Build a solid knowledge base foundation
When it comes to content development, start by focusing on depth over volume to establish a robust and scalable knowledge base. Begin with a clear understanding of customer questions and expectations; if you can’t methodically identify what customers are calling about, you’re building on shaky ground.Prioritize creating foundational content that addresses the most pressing customer needs, evolving and updating it at the right pace to stay relevant. A well-maintained knowledge base must also be optimized for AI, ensuring that it can effectively support AI-driven solutions and deliver maximum value.
- Use real-time AI to unlock the value of your knowledge
Once your knowledge base’s foundation is in place, integrate with AI tools that enable seamless, real-time access to information. This eliminates the extremely time-consuming need for agents to search for articles, verify their accuracy, read through lengthy documents, and craft responses — all while customers are left waiting. Instead, AI surfaces the right information instantly, empowering agents to provide faster, more accurate answers. Learn more about Cresta’s approach to the AI Maturity journey.Use insights from those tools to help you understand the degree of the knowledge gap in your own organization, and help you prioritize how to carry out your operational improvement goals. - Maintain and optimize your knowledge base over time
Even the most mature organizations experience a 30% knowledge gap, and bridging this is an ongoing, iterative process. Establish a knowledge base committee with representatives from across the organization: the contact center, product, and business operations teams. This committee should meet regularly to assess opportunities and address gaps. By conducting frequent audits and leveraging diverse perspectives, you can ensure your knowledge base evolves in step with changing customer needs and the growth of your business.Just having coverage isn’t enough; it’s essential to consider the intersection of what customers are asking, what your knowledge base currently provides, and whether those interactions lead to actual resolution. Leverage conversation intelligence to pinpoint knowledge gaps and prioritize updates based on real customer inquiries, ensuring your knowledge base not only evolves with your business but also aligns with the resolutions customers seek.
The Dual Value of AI-Driven Knowledge Bases
AI technology like Cresta’s delivers value at any stage of knowledge base maturity. For organizations still building out their knowledge base, AI helps surface the critical questions that customers are asking and identifies what’s missing. For those with more established knowledge bases, AI unlocks the full potential of that knowledge, ensuring agents have instant access to the answers they need.
Whether you’re just starting your AI maturity journey or looking to optimize, investing in your knowledge base is a decision that pays dividends in customer satisfaction, agent efficiency, and operational performance. The first, most important step? Treat your knowledge base not as a nice-to-have but as a strategic asset – because in today’s contact center, knowledge truly is power.
Download 7 Tips to Optimize Your Knowledge Base for an AI Future now!
