The ultimate Slack efficiency hack: AI Knowledge Assistants for handling repetitive questions

The channel manager role for a Slack #help channel is not glamorous. It involves countless hours every week copying and pasting answers to repetitive questions or trawling through documents, wikis, tickets, and conversations.

And there’s no reprieve. Throughout the day, they receive constant notifications, disrupting their focused work. The job is never "done". Every morning, they log into Slack, greeted by ten more questions waiting for answers.

Directing employees to "search in Confluence" or "look in Drive" is of little help. These tools' native search features don't provide the answers their colleagues need. And given the current economic climate, it's unrealistic for channel managers to request additional team members. With tight budgets, everyone is expected to do more with less.

But guess what? There’s a way out of this endless, time-wasting loop: AI knowledge assistants. Below, we’ll introduce AI Knowledge Assistants, how they work, and how to employ them in #help Slack channels across your organization to automatically handle up to 44% of questions and reduce the time spent by up to 73%.

What is an AI Knowledge Assistant, and how does it work?

AI Knowledge Assistants use search and natural language understanding to answer employee questions. Based on an employee’s question, they search for relevant information in a company’s knowledge bases and previous conversations to provide accurate answers grounded in the company’s data.

AI Knowledge Assistants can operate around the clock, providing answers to team members whenever needed. This allows channel managers to focus on only the most complex queries and other strategic tasks.

Dashworks’ AI Knowledge Assistant uses a unique approach that doesn't rely on data indexing. Instead, it uses real-time AI search to ensure accurate, live answers that reflect real-time changes in the company's tickets and knowledge bases. This also enhances security and privacy by avoiding indexing the company's knowledge bases.

2-steps to set up an AI Knowledge Assistant in Slack

Besides being more accurate, secure, cost-effective, and dependable than other AI knowledge assistants, Dashworks is quick to set up. Administrators simply need to:

1. Connect 30+ apps with turnkey one-click integrations.
2. Invite the Dashworks Slackbot to #help Slack channels.

At that point, channel managers can relax and watch the bot work magic.

7 Slack channels that benefit from AI Knowledge Assistants

AI Knowledge Assistants like Dashworks can streamline nearly every help channel in your organization. Keep reading to discover some common use cases where our customers integrate the Dashworks Slackbot:

1. #sales-help

The B2B sales cycle can be long and complex. To help sales folks follow SOPs, face objections head-on, and answer prospect questions, most companies have a #sales-help channel.

Typically, #sales-help or #ask-sales is managed by sales enablement, sales ops, or sales management — folks already overloaded with other tasks, like conducting training, creating educational materials, refining sales strategy, or simplifying processes.

With Dashworks enabled, they no longer have to take time away from those activities to answer FAQs. SDRs and AEs can ask the Slackbot questions like:

• Do we have any case studies for e-commerce industry?
• What is the floor for discounts on product X?
• What is our approval process for bundling in add-ons?
• When do I convert a Lead into an Opportunity?

And they learn exactly where to find this information next time. As mentioned above, all Dashworks answers come with reference links.

To get the best answers, connect your #sales-help channel to:

• CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot
• Email Clients like Gmail or Outlook
• File repositories like Google Drive, Dropbox, or Quip

2. #support-help

Even the best support reps need help occasionally, and newer folks to the team and product need extra hand-holding. Most enterprise organizations have an #ask-support or #support-help channel to offer advice or explain how to do something.

Adding a Dashworks Slackbot to that channel can automatically resolve questions like:

• Can more customers join the waitlist for feature X?
• How can customers clear their cache in our mobile app?
• How do I generate a review link?
• Will unsubscribing to marketing also stop review invites?
• How do you resolve "Your reply was not properly posted to Google. Retry your reply."?

This gives #support-help channel managers more time to troubleshoot the most pressing customer queries rather than getting bogged down with the internal ones.

To get the best answers, connect your #support-help channel to:

• Support tools like Zendesk or Intercom
• Wikis like Microsoft SharePoint or Confluence
• Help doc apps like Helpjuice

3. #product-help

At product-led organizations, the product team gets a lot of questions from sales, customer success, engineering, and marketing. These questions are often tracked in a dedicated #product-help channel, which a product team member oversees.

Dashworks can lower that channel manager’s workload by answering common questions like:

• Can our product do XYZ?
• What’s on the Q2 roadmap?
• Is feature A included in the Winter 2023 release?
• When will our integration with [insert software] be publicly available?

Employees get answers to their questions faster, and product managers get more time to speak with customers, manage their sprints, and groom their backlogs.

To get the best answers, connect your #product-help channel to:

• Wikis like Confluence
• Project management tools like Jira, Notion, Asana, or Trello
• Code bases like Bitbucket, Github, and Gitlab
• Help sites like Stack Overflow for Teams or Gitbook

4. #engineering-help

Enterprise engineering teams can be thousands deep, with sub-teams that work on different products, specific features, cybersecurity, or supporting infrastructure. And all these teams need to work together to ensure a seamless front-end experience.

#engineering-help or #ask-engineering channels are often platforms for this collaboration, where engineers or their managers answer questions like:

• How does feature X work?
• How do I access Team B’s library?
• How do I delete the ddb table in staging?
• How do I restart X container?
• How do I fix this error: Content-Type ‘application/json’ is not supported?

Usually, answering these questions takes valuable time away from development. But with Dashworks, most can be handled without any human involvement.

To get the best answers, connect your #engineering-help channel to:

• Code bases like Bitbucket, Github, and Gitlab
• Wikis like Confluence
• Project management tools like Jira
• Help sites like Stack Overflow for Teams or Gitbook

5. #it-help

Most enterprise IT teams are overwhelmed with the number of tickets in their queue. Yet they spend significant time addressing low-priority issues — most of which are resolved by pointing employees to help documentation or copying and pasting simple steps.

Several of our customers have built Dashworks-enabled Slack workflows to alleviate stress on IT. Here’s how they work:

1. A user heads to an #askIT or #IThelp channel.
2. Dashworks Slackbot prompts them to run through questions about the device they’re having trouble with, their operating system, and any other information IT might need to categorize their ticket.
3. On the back end, Dashworks reviews the request and sends the user troubleshooting information collated from help docs, IT’s Confluence pages, the company’s security guidelines, and other relevant sources.
4. If the user doesn’t find that information helpful, their request is addressed by IT managers.

Offering fixes upfront helps employees resolve their problems quickly and gives IT more time to focus on the highest-priority tickets.

To get the best answers, connect your #it-help channel to:

• Knowledge bases like Confluence and Google Docs
• IT support tools like Zendesk

6. #hr-help

Employees have questions about their team, their benefits, and company policies. That’s why most companies have an #ask-HR or #hr-help Slack channel managed by HR or finance team members.

With the Dashworks Slackbot activated, these channel managers no longer have to answer questions like:

• Where can I find information about open enrollment?
• What is our PTO policy?
• What is our 2024 holiday schedule?
• Who should I reach out regarding payroll questions?

To get the best answers, connect your #hr-help channel to:

• HRIS platforms like BambooHR, Workday, Rippling, Paylocity, or DarwinBox
• Company wikis like Confluence, Google Docs, or Dropbox

7. #onboarding-help

New hires feel like drinking from a firehose in the first few weeks of a new role. There are so many new terms, acronyms, and people to meet, and it can be intimidating for them to ask questions.

Several customers have created #onboarding-help Slack channels to relieve new hires and connect them to Dash. These channels act as a new hire’s sidekick, answering any questions they may have about projects, customers, finances, or company culture — whenever they have them.

Not only do new hires get acquainted with company documentation, but they also learn where to go to access certain information in the future.

Managers benefit from the Dashworks Slackbot, too. Rather than covering basic questions in their one-on-ones, they can have more strategic conversations about the goals and ideas of their direct reports.

Connect your #onboarding-help channel to all company apps to get the best answers.

Stop answering repetitive questions at work

Slack channel managers can use their time more effectively by letting an AI knowledge assistant like Dashworks handle repetitive questions. Dashworks provides several advantages:

• Comprehensive: Adding the Dashworks Slackbot to #help channels can automatically triage more than 40% of questions.
• Fast: Dashworks saves 73% of the time normally spent answering internal help questions or waiting for responses to internal help questions.
• Secure: Dashworks is designed to meet InfoSec and compliance requirements.
• Affordable: Our real-time API approach avoids high storage costs, so we don't need to pass these expenses on to you.

Moreover, it's free to try. So why wait?

Sign up for a free trial to explore Dashworks, or schedule a meeting with a Dashworks expert today.