‍The Problem with Siloed Knowledge in Organizations

Organizational knowledge is often fragmented across various systems and repositories, such as SharePoint, Confluence, Google Drive, and company websites. This fragmentation poses significant challenges for both service agents and customers, severely impacting efficiency and the overall service experience. 

Service Agent Efficiency

One of the primary issues with siloed knowledge is the inefficiency it creates for service agents. When knowledge is spread across multiple platforms, agents are forced to engage in constant context switching. This means they have to navigate between different systems to find the information they need, which is time-consuming and disruptive. This not only slows down the resolution of customer issues but also increases the cognitive load on agents, leading to frustration and burnout.

Customer Self-Service Capabilities

Fragmented knowledge also hampers the effectiveness of self-service solutions. When customers try to find answers through self-service portals, they often encounter incomplete or outdated information because the relevant knowledge is scattered across various repositories. This leads to higher customer effort and dissatisfaction as they struggle to find accurate and timely solutions to their problems. Consequently, more customers resort to contacting support, increasing the workload for service agents.

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Impact on AI Implementation

The rise of AI in customer service has been a game-changer, with 79% of service organizations investing in AI to support their agents. However, 76% of executives struggle to scale AI effectively due to disconnected systems and siloed data. AI systems rely on comprehensive and integrated data to function optimally. When knowledge is siloed, AI cannot access all the necessary information to provide accurate recommendations, predictive insights, or automated responses. This limitation reduces the effectiveness of AI, preventing organizations from fully realizing the benefits of their AI investments.

Operational Inefficiencies

Siloed knowledge creates operational inefficiencies beyond just service agents and customers. It affects the entire organization by slowing down decision-making processes and hindering collaboration. Employees across different departments may find it difficult to access and share crucial information, leading to redundant work and missed opportunities for innovation and improvement.

Cost Implications

Maintaining multiple, disconnected knowledge systems is also costly. Organizations spend significant resources on managing and updating disparate systems. Additionally, the inefficiencies caused by siloed knowledge translate into higher operational costs, such as longer resolution times for customer issues and lower overall productivity.

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Understanding Salesforce Einstein

Salesforce Einstein is an integrated set of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that bring advanced data science capabilities to the Salesforce Customer 360 platform. Designed to enhance the functionality of Salesforce products, Einstein offers predictive and prescriptive insights, automating processes to help businesses make smarter decisions, increase efficiency, and provide a more personalized customer experience.

Salesforce Einstein enhances customer insights by analyzing data to provide deeper understanding of customer behavior and preferences, enabling personalized experiences. It increases efficiency by automating routine tasks and offering AI-driven recommendations, allowing employees to focus on higher-value activities. Improved decision-making is achieved through predictive analytics and prescriptive recommendations, ensuring better business outcomes. Scalable AI solutions make Einstein suitable for businesses of all sizes and industries. Use cases include predicting and prioritizing sales leads, automating support queries, conducting sentiment analysis, segmenting marketing audiences, personalizing campaigns, optimizing inventory management, and enhancing e-commerce product recommendations.

Unified Knowledge for Einstein AI

For Einstein to be effective in supporting agents and self-service operations, it needs to have access and be grounded to the most authoritative knowledge from across the enterprise. However, an estimated average of 80% of the enterprise knowledge resides outside of Salesforce in various repositories (e.g. Google, Confluence, Sharepoint) which Einstein isn’t even aware of. 

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Without visibility into this knowledge or the ability to ground it, Einstein will not effectively leverage this knowledge. This means agents and end-users won’t see it in search results and recommendations or be able to produce and use generative AI content based on it. In other words, you’re stopping them from enjoying all of that Einstein AI goodness and from improving your support and self-service KPIs. 

Zoomin and Salesforce's Unified Knowledge addresses this challenge by consolidating organizational knowledge into a unified platform within Salesforce, enhancing both agent productivity and customer experience.

Unified Knowledge allows Salesforce customers to consolidate relevant enterprise knowledge from virtually any source and format. This unified content fuels Service Cloud Einstein, enabling AI-driven solutions such as AI-search, Article Recommendations, Einstein Bots, Generative Search Answers, and Service Replies.

Unified Knowledge leverages the power of Einstein Generative AI to provide comprehensive and accurate information across all customer touchpoints. By grounding AI in a unified knowledge base, organizations can significantly improve AI coverage and accuracy, ensuring robust generative AI content.

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How does Unified Knowledge work?

Unified Knowledge enables Salesforce customers to consolidate existing relevant enterprise knowledge from virtually any source and format. This external content is unified alongside the customer’s own Salesforce Knowledge articles. Unified Knowledge is the only supported way by Salesforce to leverage external knowledge with Service Cloud Einstein, in addition to other Clouds.

This fuels Service Cloud Einstein with the authoritative content it needs. Now, this knowledge can be fully leveraged in various use-cases including AI-search, Article Recommendations, Einstein Bots, Generative Search Answers and Service Replies.  

Unified Knowledge is powered by a state-of-the-art, scalable knowledge orchestration platform powered by Zoomin. This platform orchestrates and monitors knowledge connectors used to reach out to or accept content from external knowledge repositories in a secure way. Unified Knowledge platform ensures ongoing and regular synchronization of the knowledge from the external repositories, without requiring content authors to do any change management or migrate away from their favorite authoring and content management toolchain. The external knowledge is converted by the platform from its native format into a unified schema.

‍Setting Up Unified Knowledge

Setting up Unified Knowledge is straightforward and ensures that all your organizational knowledge is readily accessible. Here’s a step-by-step guide:

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1. Choose Your Connectors: Select the appropriate connectors for your third-party knowledge systems in the Salesforce Setup.
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2. Import and Sync: Salesforce will automatically import and sync articles from the chosen sources. The content will be available in a read-only HTML or PDF format, ensuring data integrity.
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3. Monitor the Process: Use the Unified Knowledge page in Setup to monitor the article import queue and view the statuses of your import jobs.
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4. Enjoy a Unified Knowledge Base: With all your organizational knowledge consolidated, you can leverage it across various customer touchpoints and search experiences within Salesforce.

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Benefits of Unified knowledge

Built through a strategic partnership Between Salesforce and  Zoomin, Unified Knowledge amplifies capabilities such as: 

• Knowledge Answers in Bots: Automatically generate answers to customer inquiries within a bot, based on a company’s complete internal and external knowledge base. Retail customers, for example, can use bots to access knowledge and generate answers to questions that require information from third-party sources, such as clothing care instructions that come from a manufacturer.
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• Einstein Copilot for Mobile Workers: With Einstein Copilot and Unified Knowledge, mobile workers can ask a question and get an instant response, sourced from the full slate of a company’s organizational knowledge. For instance, if a technician is having trouble installing a dishwasher, they can chat with Copilot to troubleshoot the issue in real time.
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• Search Answers: Generate answers to both agent and customer questions grounded in a company’s trusted knowledge base and surfaced directly within a customer portal or agent console. With this capability, a banking customer can search for and receive step-by-step instructions, sourced from multiple knowledge articles, to resolve issues such as canceling a credit card or requesting a credit increase without any agent assistance.

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Unified Knowledge is a game-changer for businesses looking to streamline their knowledge management and leverage the full potential of Salesforce’s AI capabilities. By integrating knowledge from diverse sources, you can enhance both employee efficiency and customer satisfaction. Start setting up Unified Knowledge today and experience the benefits of a fully integrated knowledge base.

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