Utilizing AI to automate your support forum

Introduction

In the world of rapidly evolving technology, where online user interactions are the norm, enhancing the quality of user support in your business is a crucial challenge. User support, especially on an online forum, often requires a lot of time and resources on your side. This involves moderating content, answering questions, and managing interactions. In this context, AI may be a game-changer for your business, as it allows you to automate and optimize the support forum.

In this article, we will see how utilizing AI to analyze existing forum threads and your documentation may significantly improve your efficiency, at the same time reducing the cost of moderation and making the user experience better.

Revolution in user interaction thanks to AI

When developing a product, be it physical, a SaaS platform, or digital, managing user support is essential. There's a high chance you have a dedicated support forum for your users where they can ask their questions and ask for help.

It's not uncommon to see on such forums that people tend to ask questions that have been already asked, looking for answers that have been already given, or asking for help when it's all described in your documentation. These are the reasons (among others) why we need forum moderators. They are scanning the new threads and have to mark such questions as duplicates or link a specific documentation page as an answer.

Screenshot of duplicated threads on our forum

Of course, on huge forums, like StackOverflow, you need only a few mods as most of the work is done by a high-reputation users. But let's be real, your support forum is most likely not that big and you don't have such a gigantic community who care about the content. There's a high chance you have paying customers who demand an answer - that's it. Hence the need for moderators who will do the job.

Unfortunately, dealing with all of that manually is time-consuming and expensive. And that's where AI comes in: chatbot, fed with all your data from the forum and the documentation, can automatically answer the most common user questions.

Our experience with the Support Forum AI

At MDB, we also provide a dedicated space for our users where they can ask questions. And we also are facing the same problems. That's why we decided to integrate AI into our support forum. It's still a work-in-progress, but we already see that it will bring an immense value and will allow our Support Team to focus on a more creative work and answering the harder and more unique questions.

By utilizing RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), we created a chatbot that gets triggered before posting a new question and does its best to give you a personalized answer right away while also proposing a few similar questions that already have answers. Only when users won't find it helpful, they will be able to navigate to the standard Ask Question form.

Preview of our AI Support Forum assistant

This solution dramatically increases effectiveness for both our users and our Support Team. We can now focus on more complex questions, leaving the common ones in the hands of AI. It significantly reduces our operational costs and improves the whole team's effectiveness.

Final thoughts: AI as a enhancement, not replacement

While integrating AI solutions with your business, you must keep in mind that it's just as good as the data it's trained on. In this case, your users should be always informed that the answer is AI-generated and you should always leave them a way to contact a real person. AI is a powerful tool but cannot (yet?) completely replace humans in user interactions.

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