Support Enhancements: Elevating Your Chat Experience with AI 9522

Support Enhancements: Elevating Your Chat Experience with AI

Published

We’re thrilled to announce an exciting enhancement to our support chat virtual assistant!

Starting today, April 29th, Blackbaud will harness the power of AI and the collective wisdom of our Knowledgebase to enhance your chat experience and transform the way you find solutions for questions related to Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT®, Raiser’s Edge®, Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®, Financial Edge®, and our Blackbaud education management solutions.

What’s changing?

You can now leverage chat to self-serve on additional inquiries and receive solutions quickly! No more manual searches or sifting through multiple resources. Our AI-optimized chat virtual assistant uses Blackbaud expert resources to generate precise answers.

Here’s what you can expect:

  • Reduced effort: Gen AI provides concise answers, saving you time and effort by eliminating lengthy searches.

  • Customer feedback-driven: We’ve listened to your input! Based on your valuable feedback, we’ve expanded the virtual assistant’s capabilities to cover additional inquiries.

  • Faster resolution: Get answers quicker without waiting for a live agent. Our AI-optimized chat virtual assistant is lightning-fast and efficient.

  • Human touch when needed: For complex issues, our dedicated support team is available to assist you—AI complements their expertise!
  • Blackbaud Expertise: Although we're using AI, our chat virtual assistant is trained only in expert resources from Blackbaud.


Tips for optimal use:

  • Open citations: Curious about the source material? AI provides citations within its answers. Simply click to view the original Knowledgebase articles.

  • Rate solutions: After receiving an answer, use the yes or no buttons to provide feedback. Your ratings help us improve!

As part of our Intelligence for Good® strategy, we’re committed to bringing you AI-powered capabilities that are accessible, powerful, and responsible. We believe this change will significantly enhance your experience with our support resources.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue striving to provide exceptional support tailored to meet your needs!

News Community News 04/29/2024 11:00am EDT

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6 Comments
Kenna Anna Kenna Anna Aug '24

Great to see these enhancements! The AI-powered chat sounds like a game changer for quick support. It reminds me of how platforms like omegle new have transformed online interactions. Excited to see how this evolves!

I've been so disappointed in Support Services the last few times I've used it. I have to navigate around the initial chat bot that points me to articles and resources I've already reviewed without getting results. In the past, I used to get support for my issue, sometimes down to step by step guidance. Now when I chat with support, I am asked to restate my question/goal multiple times and then ultimately told that they will have to consult with their team and email me with a solution, which sometimes takes days and often points me back to the very same article I've already reviewed.

I strongly agree with Joe and Isaac!! Most other vendor Knowledgebases have time stamp and last updated. This is key to see the timeliness of info (worth my time/applicable to my current issue) , but also with all the movement and changes relative to RE NXT and FE NXT, is it even applicable any more.

On another note, I am not sure addition of AI to chat would of been a priority for me either, but with using it, it has full access to Knowledgebase and other resources and ultimately a person at BB would be using it to communicate/support me anyway. Overall, it has been able to provide some help to me without the need of contact with a human. If a little effort there allows BB to apply resources to other priorities then great! Communicate to us how you are reapplying those resources and hopefully improve on items such as providing backend “date created” and “last updated” info visible on KB articles which seems that would be a minimal effort item. AI might help with that too.

Thank you for your efforts to continually improve our support and resources!

Matt Lacy Matt Lacy May '24

It is great to hear that you have been able to interact with our AI chat and receive assistance without needing to speak with an agent. Introducing AI is only part of our digital transformation strategy (you can find more details on our strategy here: https://community.blackbaud.com/blogs/61/9532). As we continue to enhance and introduce new capabilities, we will communicate to our customers through future Community posts, including one in a couple weeks on our Knowledge Management process.

We are reviewing the suggestion of adding the created date and last updated date on the Knowledgebase articles for future enhancements.

I can see how this is useful from Blackbaud's side as it reduces the number of humans needed to meet the high demand for support, and if it would reduce the number of “No agents available, try later” messages, than that's great.

However, simply adding TIMESTAMPS to the KB articles would be a huge boon to the end-users. A simple “Post created” and “post updated” issue would save us so much time.

Matt Lacy Matt Lacy May '24

Thank you for your feedback, the goal of AI and our digital strategy is to allow for self-service for the known questions, while making our agents available for the complex issues, improving the speed for you to receive resolution and preventing you from receiving the “No agents available” message. The suggestion of adding the created date and last updated date on the Knowledge articles is one we are reviewing for future enhancements.

What a waste of resources that you dedicated to this !!!

As an organisation Blackbaud is majorly falling behind and the rate of feautres being rolled out to RE NXT & FE NXT leave alot to be desired.

You would have served your clients better by devoting these resources into area where it would make a real difference.

Matt Lacy Matt Lacy May '24

Thank you for your feedback. We are committed to product innovation and I'd recommend registering for our Product Update Briefings where our product team reviews recently released features and discusses upcoming enhancements and roadmap.

Hi,

What you could do that would really help me a lot is:
1. make it so that the article's original publication date and “last updated” date (if any) show up on the article page itself. This is extremely useful information in determining the weight with which to give a particular KB article. This is not to say that an old article is never useful, but it's useful for things like determining which advice to follow when two KB articles contradict each other.
2. Have people on your end go through and look for any articles that are truly obsolete, and mark them as “deprecated” or something. There's a ton of old KB articles out there that are likely not that accurate anymore.


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LLMs (Large Language Models) don't actually do what the people that sell them claim they can do. At least they don't do it with any degree of reliability.

LLMs don't actually work very well. At all.

For example, I tried “How do I sign in?” with product = “Raiser's Edge”.

I tried several times in different browsers. I got variations of the below (see bottom of post).

I'm confused. What is Altru? Why is it talking about single sign-on? Why does it keep talking about that? Why doesn't it consider the possibility of Raiser's Edge being self-hosted?

I feel like maybe I ought to know what Altru is…

Of course I tried asking the AI. But when I prompt with “What is Altru?” and with the system still set at “Raiser's Edge", the AI doesn't even try to generate a response. I just get the normal results page.

Back to that previous answer from the AI: Of course I could downvote the answer the AI provided – but as an end-user of Blackbaud software, I kind of prefer to use software that doesn't feel like it's still in Beta. (The up and down voting system is a way to try to further hone the AI into giving correct responses. But in my humble opinion, if you're releasing it to the public as an improvement over existing search, it should already be able to give correct answers with a frequency so high that it wouldn't need me to tell it if it's doing a good job or not.)


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Blackbaud AI response to “How do I sign in?” with system = “Raiser's Edge”:


To sign in to Altru after switching to single sign-on, you will need to follow these steps:

1. Go to the Blackbaud.com login page.

2. Enter your Blackbaud.com username and password.

3. Click on the Altru link on the Blackbaud.com page.

4. If this is your first time logging in after switching to single sign-on, you may see a prompt asking you to enter your previous Altru username and password one last time to finish linking your accounts. Enter your Altru username and password, then select "Link Accounts."

5. After linking your accounts, you will only need to use your Blackbaud.com credentials for all future logins.

If you have successfully logged into Altru before and are experiencing issues, you can try clearing your browser's cache and reopening your browser. If the issue persists, you can click on "Chat with Support" and reference the provided article for further assistance.

Matt Lacy Matt Lacy May '24

Thank you for the feedback on adding the article created data and last updated date to the article itself. We are reviewing this and consider adding this in future Knowledgebase enhancements. We are also focused on reviewing old articles and will be providing more information on our Knowledge Management process in a Community blog post in the coming weeks.

Related to the AI response you received when searching for “How do I sign in?” with Raiser’s Edge selected as the product has been resolved. This was an issue with the data tagging on the articles that were being included in the response. The thumbs up and thumbs down feedback is valuable as it provides analytics of the search that led to the feedback, which our teams can review, and add/edit content so future searches are correct.

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