Knowledge base

A knowledge gap is a recurring customer question the knowledge base cannot answer, usually visible as repeat escalations or low-confidence fallbacks on the same intent. Systematically closing gaps is the highest-return maintenance activity available to any team running automated support at scale.

Grounding is the practice of constraining an AI agent’s answers to approved knowledge sources and live system data rather than to the model’s own training. Grounding is the main defence against hallucination, and it is what makes an AI answer auditable back to a specific document or record.

Retrieval-augmented generation grounds answers by retrieving an organisation’s own documents at the moment of answering and passing them to the model as context. It keeps responses current without retraining, and it makes each answer traceable to the specific source the system actually consulted.

Self-service is help a customer can complete without contacting support at all, such as a help centre article, an account action, or a guided flow. Its success is measured by task completion rather than page views, since a read article that fails to resolve still generates a contact.