eGain, the software company and knowledge platform for customer engagement automation, announced the integration of its eGain Knowledge Hub with Microsoft Teams in a move aimed at spurring employee productivity levels.

Powered by AI and analytics, Knowledge Hub is eGain’s cloud solution for orchestrating customer engagement. The system can automate routine employee queries on policies, procedures, and functional know-how, and its virtual assistant fields queries when needed to better understand user intent before delivering personalized answers from the eGain Knowledge Base. The solution allows conversations to be transitioned with full context to live chat, where subject matter experts handle queries on eGain’s Advisor Desktop. Users, meanwhile, get their questions answered from within Teams.

By providing agents with a range of ways to access information from a common repository of knowledge, the Knowledge Hub is able to infuse all agents with the knowledge they need, rendering all agents—novice and expert workers alike—equal in productivity while delivering consistent and accurate answers quickly, eGain executives explain.

The Knowledge Hub is an example of intelligent knowledge management systems  that find answers to customer questions, guide processes, and help in decision-making. Ashu Roy, CEO at eGain, says the company’s solutions are meant to boost productivity by making information readily available and accessible. “One of the biggest elephants in the room that saps performance is the time employees spend looking for knowledge,” notes Roy. “eGain Knowledge Hub will help seal this productivity drain for enterprise Teams users.”

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The integration of Knowledge Hub with Microsoft Teams comes on the heels of an earlier product announcement from Sunnyvale, California-based eGain. Last week, eGain announced the general availability of Instant Answers, a solution that deploys generative AI technology to help users find relevant answers that arrive in the form of snippets after scouring enterprise knowledge bases.

Instant Answers employs Large Language Models (LLM) tuned to enterprise-specific content to find the best answer snippet in context, often extracted from long documents, without expecting the user to guess the right keywords. At the same time, knowledge authors can spend less time curating enterprise-approved, long-form content into consumable knowledge articles.

The result is a win-win, eGain says: Users can easily find the best answers from freshly updated content, while knowledge managers do not have to struggle with persistent content curation backlog.

The LLM technology behind Instant Answers is the same mechanism that powers ChatGPT, the buzzy AI chatbot that uses deep learning techniques to generate conversational, human-like responses to text inputs. eGain CEO Roy says Instant Answers has been a big hit in a limited-release run to clients. “They love the quick value it delivers,” Roy declares.