Support Enhancements: Elevating Your Chat Experience with AI

Asking for assistance with the new AI has become such a waste of time I try only to use it in highly emergency situations and in 90% of the time after using it I leave without any real solution to my problem. This means I am not using all the features to their full capacities and leaves are school wondering if there is a better product out there. Most of my staff have used other school management systems in the past and feel that they were more user friendly and had better support systems. The integration of your AI has just solidified this feeling among the staff.

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!

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.

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.

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.