Tips and Techniques to Close Knowledge Gaps
Forethought software is designed to be the most human-centric GenAI for customer service, plugging into a company’s business and ticket data to align with the answers provided by the company’s best agents. Its models look at conversations, customer sentiment, and satisfaction measures and whether the answer resolved the issue, among other metrics. “Our powerful RAG engine is designed to find the needle in the haystack,” said Deon Nicholas, CEO and co-founder of Forethought, “and then uses a proprietary agentic AI engine to take actions on behalf of the user. It also helps human agents, detects knowledge gaps, and provides actionable insights.”
One of Forethought’s customers is Etekcity, which sells products ranging from kitchen appliances to personal care and travel supplies under several different brand names. Its mission is to offer products that are thoughtfully engineered for convenience, practicality, and value. One issue it experienced was a customer support process that frequently needed to respond to basic questions about warranties or manuals, although that information was provided on the website. In the absence of a standard process for responding, agents depended on informal knowledge from their peers, and the responses could be inconsistent.
Etekcity considered its help desk chatbot as a possible solution but found it was not flexible enough. After looking into some options, it selected Forethought as its customer support AI solution. Forethought Assist helps agents quickly find the relevant information and attach it to the customer’s ticket. In addition, Forethought Assist facilitates onboarding of new agents, who can retrieve the information they need without having to rely on coworkers or formal training.
Forethought Solve is designed for self-service, and begins by understanding the intent of the customer’s question. It can access Etekcity’s knowledgebase, previous tickets, and other corporate information to allow customers to find the status of an order, for example, without the assistance of a human agent.
Combined with Forethought Assist, it has reduced the burden on agents and expedited resolution. Etekcity reported nearly a 70% reduction time to first response, a 60% reduction in average time-to-resolu- tion, and a 48% self-service rate.
Forethought emulates interactions with a live agent much more closely than chatbots because of its natural language interface and understanding of content. “Drop-down menus are the bane of customer support,” asserted Nicholas, “because all too often the options do not match the need.” In contrast to many self-service solutions, Forethought has a deep semantic capability, beginning with its proprietary implementation of RAG and agentic AI that searches past conversations and other resources, then uses a mix of keyword, neural network semantic search, and vector embeddings to understand meaning and relationships in order to narrow the search. Then 50 to 100 documents are narrowed down by another neural network, and a proprietary large language model is applied to zero in on the relevant chunks.
In addition to being used for customer self-service, Forethought Solve reveals the most widely discussed topics and the knowledge gaps as reflected in analytics that identifies unresolved issues. It also tracks what agents are saying, and whether there are topics on which the agents and the knowledgebase are not consistent. “If an answer is not correct, it will be marked as a bad conversation and then an article can be added or the system can generate a new one on behalf of the user,” Nicholas added. “Forethought can also escalate a call to a human agent if an answer cannot be found.”
Knowledge gaps are a moving target, and companies must institute continuous improvement procedures to keep up. Numerous avenues exist for detecting knowledge gaps, including employee assessments and technology-derived metrics. Remedies include training and, increasingly, deploying AI solutions to seek out new information. Organizations will need to proactively monitor these gaps and use the available tools to close them in order to stay competitive.