Your FAQ Section is Broken. AI Can Fix It.

FAQ sections serve an important purpose for most organisations. If implemented well, FAQ sections can limit the amount of customer service events to a few; which should translate to manageable workload for customer service personnel and (potentially) a reduction in HR costs for the organisation that is witnessing growth in active customer base.

However, the challenge with most FAQ sections of company websites is that finding the right question and answer combination is not so easy for the user. This is simply because the way questions on the same topic could be asked can be as unique as the thumbprint of each individual.

This is where the Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities for artificial intelligence (AI) can come in.

Imagine a website FAQ section that can:

• converse with the user
• understand the context of the question that the user is raising
• search the predefined dataset of knowledge to find and translate the right answer into a response that the user will understand; and propose the best remedial action for the user.

How can a webmaster use NLP to become a customer service hero?

A good way to think of this opportunity is to view NLP as that genius kid that can quickly read many pages, understand and grow in its knowledge of a particular subject; and act intelligently on the knowledge it acquires.

Understanding the Basics

Before we dive into the nitty-gritty, let's clarify some key terms:

• Natural Language Processing (NLP): This is the branch of Artificial Intelligence that allows computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language.
• Pre-trained NLP models: These are AI models that have been trained on massive amounts of text data, making them incredibly good at understanding and generating human language. Popular examples include BERT and Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPT).
• Conversational AI frontend: This is a user interface that allows users to interact with a system using natural language, similar to chatting with a person.

Building Your AI FAQ Assistant

1. Choose Your AI Weapon:

• BERT: Ideal for understanding the context of a sentence.
• GPT: Excels at generating human-like text.
• Other options include RoBERTa and XLNet.

2. Prepare Your Knowledge Base:

• Clean and organise your data: Ensure your FAQ content is accurate, consistent, and relevant.
• Create training data: Develop examples of user questions and corresponding answers from your dataset to teach the model.

3. Train Your AI:

• Leverage a framework: Tools like Hugging Face Transformers simplify this process.
• Feed the model: Provide your prepared dataset for the model to learn.
• Fine-tune for perfection: Adjust settings like learning rate and batch size to optimize performance.

4. Design the User Interface:

• Choose a framework: React, Angular, or Vue are popular options.
• Integrate the model: Connect your trained model to the frontend.
• Create a conversational experience: Design an intuitive chat interface.
• Implement question answering: Use the model to process user input and deliver relevant answers.

5. Test and Refine:

• Gather feedback: Collect user input on the interface and answer quality.
• Continuously improve: Refine the model based on user feedback.

Additional Tips for Success

• Keep it simple: Start with a basic conversational interface and gradually add features.
• Handle ambiguity: Employ intent recognition to understand user goals.
• Provide feedback options: Allow users to rate answers and suggest improvements.
• Monitor performance: Track metrics like response time, accuracy, and user satisfaction.

By following these steps and incorporating AI into your FAQ section, you can significantly enhance user experience, reduce customer support load, and elevate your website's overall performance.

Remember, building a conversational AI is an iterative process. Embrace experimentation and continuous improvement to create a truly exceptional customer experience.