Today’s business world has tons of assistive tools, collaborative platforms, virtual environments, CRMs, and much more. It seems that almost every day there’s a new, cutting-edge, tool hitting the market and changing how we do business. However, there is one thing that has remained consistent in the business world. For almost 30 years, email communication has been the number one method of communication for companies. According to Forbes, professionals spend 28% of their workday just reading and writing emails, which amounts to around 2 hours of interaction and 120 messages received every day. With this, there are over 4 billion email users in the world, and 306 billion emails are sent every day.
So with all the new advancements on business collaboration such as Microsoft Teams and Slack, why is email still around? Will this dinosaur truly stand the test of time? Experts say email will stay relevant and will be the most effective means of communication tomorrow. Regardless of it will, it’s still prominent because it's omnipresent. While Teams and Slack are fantastic tools, not everyone has them; almost every business has email. Let’s look at the evolution of email. In the 1990s, America Online (AOL) changed the email game allowing users to customize their inboxes and coined the automated voice “You’ve got mail” when there are unread inbox messages. In the early 2000s, Microsoft introduced automated anti-phishing filters and the automated placement of suggested “junk mail” messages. Also in the 2000s, Blackberry offered the first mobile phones where you can read, send, and manage your emails entirely on the mobile phone. Obviously, Apple iPhones took that baton and ran away with it after 2010, but other smart phone providers are not far behind. Not long after, Artificial Intelligence (AI) started to be used for email marketing. According to Smart Insights, AI has propelled email marketing campaigns through smart personalization such as automation of email writing, gathering of necessary data, and automated timing calibration. 2 AI has been a virtual assistant in gathering essential data to compose marketing emails with high personalization accuracy. Along with this, AI has been an import component of other automated business flows such as intelligent email responders.
As email integrations continue to grow, there has been one demand that has sprouted over the past couple years. The releasing of buried email data. What’s this mean? Company emails have tons of important customer and internal communication that contains invaluable information that can be of good use. Information such as FAQs, product specifications, use cases, and solution scenarios are buried somewhere down there, and keyword search isn’t sufficient if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for.
Knowledgebases are a common tool within businesses to provide a helpful hand that empowers employees to find answers. A knowledge base is a technology used to store complex structured and unstructured information. Some providers of knowledgebases are Atlassian, SAP, and Zendesk. However, businesses are now wanting to have their email archives as a knowledgebase. This is a huge dilemma because data inside of emails is not only unstructured, but incredibly cluttered with disclaimers, signatures, and duplicates due to many copies of the “email chain”. Along with this, there are concerns that personally identifiable information (PII) is scattered in these archives as well.
Small businesses usually have those few employees that tend to have most of the answers in their brain, due to experience. Everyone goes to these select few to ask questions or request help on a subject. However, what if one of these important employees becomes unavailable? How can there be a smooth transition of continuous business flow?
This is where the demand for an email knowledgebase comes in. Most small businesses don’t have the luxury of a highly powerful SAP engine, and even if they do, there is a ton of effort to document all the little things that may or may not be of importance. Instead, they’d like to query the vital employees past interactions with customers to see how they’ve handled certain situations. How? Through their email archives. Again, this goes back to FAQs, product specifications, use cases, and solution scenarios.
Few companies, such as ebase.ai, have developed a way to provide their customers with a true knowledgebase that is built on email archives while alleviating the concerns briefly mentioned above. This includes the purification of data so that relevant answers may be returned, and redaction of PII through machine learning. It’s important to understand, however, that a true knowledgebase must be based on semantic questions.
Have you ever noticed someone in a TV show or movie and knew they were in another program that you’ve seen before, but you could not recall which one? What did you do? Chances are, you googled the actor’s name with movies, such as “Bill Paxton movies”. Here, you’re using semantic search. If you knew exactly what to search for, such as “Bill Paxton Twister movie”, then you would remember the program you saw the actor in the first place. This is the luxury of a semantic search is that you don’t need to necessarily know exactly what you’re looking for, more so a direction and AI will do the rest.
This is what ebase.ai has done with an email knowledgebase, and this is how it’s different from regular email keyword search (that every email platform provides). Customers are now using email knowledgebases, like ebase.ai, to ask questions on product specifications, use cases, and solution scenarios instead of asking their few vital employees, allowing a more empowered environment. This is also acting as a loss aversion method to ensure business continuity if disaster strikes with one of the vital employees. Businesses all over the world are becoming more aware of email knowledgebases and finding the value of turning stale archives into rich databases. The upside of knowledge decentralization and redundancy is increasing speed for teams of all sizes.
Visit ebase.ai to schedule a complimentary demo of how this works so that you may see for yourself the wonders of combining a smart knowledgebase and email archives.
References
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/04/13/will-email-stand-the-test-of-time/?sh=1971a57f3065
https://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/how-artificial-intelligence-is-reshaping-email-marketing/
https://d1.awsstatic.com/architecture-diagrams/ArchitectureDiagrams/ai-ml-based-intelligent-email-responder-ra.pdf?did=wp_card&trk=wp_card
