The Great Retirement or The Silver Tsunami is already under way. Every day, 12,000 baby boomers are retiring in the United States alone, taking with them decades of hard-earned knowledge and expertise. The services industry is no exception to this tidal wave, but boomer knowledge loss will impact this sector even more than product-oriented industries.
Whether it is designing data centers, managing construction projects, preparing tax returns, fixing your industrial equipment or home appliance on site, helping with travel, or providing consulting, the service is the product, and the product is the service. It is harder to reverse-engineer undocumented and often tacit knowledge sitting in the minds of experts in the services sector than breaking a product apart and reverse-engineering the technology and knowhow, which you can do when you have a tangible product. Knowledge loss in the services sector is no doubt an existential threat.
According to a recent APQC survey of services organizations around the world, sponsored by eGain, 52 percent of the services workforce will leave within five years. While 79 percent of customer experience leaders are very concerned about knowledge loss from these retirees (mission-critical, strong, or moderate concern), only 26 percent are capturing knowledge from departing employees consistently or at least most of the time. A whopping 75 percent rely on manual knowledge capture methods like people-to-people transfer, which is not scalable or sustainable. No wonder lack of time and resources top the barriers to knowledge capture in this sector!
Artificial intelligencecan help cut this Gordian knot! However, while services teams are excited about AI, a stunning 92 percent have yet to operationalize it. Top barriers to AI adoption include concerns about correctness and compliance of AI-generated answers. This lack of trust leads to inaction, perpetual pilots, or reluctance to leverage AI to automate knowledge management and other business processes. The result? Anxious hand-wringing and a potential knowledge apocalypse, as boomers head to golf courses.
Knowledge and AI: Partners in Services Transformation
How can organizations create trust in AI-generated answers? The answer lies in layering it on a trusted knowledge foundation since AI is subject to the garbage-in-garbage-out rule like everything else.
The symbiosis between AI and knowledge management is powerful. AI can help automate the entire knowledge capture, management, and optimization process. Our clients are using eGain's proprietary AI Knowledge Method to mine the most important questions (e.g., the most frequent, valuable, or complex questions) and trusted answers (e.g., answers given by trusted subject matter experts), synthesize, draft, and curate knowledgebase articles in the eGain AI Knowledge Hub for easy consumption with a human expert in the loop. As the foundation for AI, the hub also includes robust content management capabilities, including workflows for compliance and quality control, to make sure that AI is built on trusted content. This approach ensures that AI answers and guidance are correct, consumable, and compliant, (i.e., trusted). Trust ignites adoption, and adoption creates business value, as illustrated by success stories.
Per recent research from MIT, only 5 percent of companies are seeing business value from AI. That said, eGain clients have seen nothing short of transformational business value from AI by automating CX with the power of trusted knowledge behind it. They will easily belong in the 5 percent that have been successful with AI! Here is a services sector example from a human capital business process outsourcer and eGain client:
A leading human capital BPO serving 30 million employees across 200 countries and thousands of business clients faced a knowledge management crisis. With 8,000 agents using fragmented legacy tools, there was no single source of truth. Among other issues were the following:
- Multiple tools across lines of business and clients;
- Current tools did not meet the needs of all the lines of business;
- Updates were expensive and time-consuming; and
- No insight into knowledge performance.
Agents lost confidence in the knowledge resources, leading to longer hold times for customers and incorrect answers. Contact center performance was declining and agent churn increasing.
After formulating requirements by listening to users and contact center managers, the company selected eGain for its rich, AI-powered, end-to-end knowledge management capabilities, open architecture, pre-built connectors to existing systems, and proven success at scale.
The eGain solution met all their critical business requirements. The service organization used a standard portal design while allowing client-specific branding and content, making navigation easy. eGain's pre-built connectors enabled rapid import of content and real-time context from existing systems, such as document repositories and contact center-as-a-service platforms. Based on analytics, the team redesigned content for easy access to answers for the most frequently asked questions. Multi-layered personalization allowed the service team to tailor portals, based on the region and the client.
Most recently, the service organization implemented eGain AI Agent for Contact Center embedded in the Genesys Agent Desktop. The eGain AI Knowledge Hub draws real-time voice and digital context from Genesys to boot up generated answers and guidance from reasoning.
Today, the eGain AI knowledge platform powers more than 700 portals with more than half a million articles, including the following:
- 2.3 million knowledge article views per month;
- More than 10,000 active users during peak periods;
- Three legacy applications retired; and
- Most used technology.
Agents now have intuitive tools with navigation, findability, and real-time guidance features they had been demanding for years. Consistent design enables multi-client scaling while visual branding ensures clarity. Thrilled with the agentic AI pilot, the team is expanding the AI Agent Contact Center deployment to more than 800 clients.
The Silver Tsunami is here. The question isn't whether it will reshape the services landscape, because it is already doing it. The question is whether you will ride the wave to competitive advantage with AI automation and trusted knowledge or continue to watch the knowledge bleed helplessly and slip from your market position.
Anand Subramaniam is senior vice president of global marketing at eGain.