Your customers’ answers are scattered across academies, help centers, and docs, and AI is multiplying the conflicts. Here’s why we built a new foundation for customer success. Welcome to the customer knowledge era.
By Irana Wasti, CEO, Thought Industries
This week we launched our Customer Knowledge AI Platform, along with Thought Industries’ Lens, a new first-of-its-kind AI product. Together with Thought Industries Academy, they help businesses give customers trusted, accurate answers wherever they look for help.
As I mark my first year as CEO, this launch brings to life an opportunity that drew me to the company, and a belief that has shaped my career in product leadership: building a great product is only half the equation. What matters is whether customers can realize its full value.
Businesses grow only when their customers succeed. But customers don’t experience a business through its org chart. They experience one product and one company, and they expect one consistent answer. Yet the knowledge customers need to be successful is scattered across academies, help centers, product documentation, and other systems, each owned by a different team. As a result, customers search for answers, sort through conflicting information, and piece together guidance businesses should have delivered.
Three shifts driving the customer knowledge era
Over the past year, through extensive conversations with business leaders across the industry, including many of our own customers, and insights from several industry surveys we’ve conducted, three major shifts have become clear. Each is making this problem more urgent and fundamentally changing what customers expect.
1. Customers expect answers, not searches.
The rapid adoption of AI tools like ChatGPT has changed how customers seek information. Customers now expect to ask a question and get an answer so they can get on with what they’re doing in your product.
2. AI is multiplying answers, but not necessarily accuracy or consistency.
To keep up, teams are adding AI chatbots to their existing tools. But each one draws from its own sources. So a customer can get a fast answer from one system that reflects last week’s release, and a different answer from another that’s months out of date.
3. Product innovation is outpacing the ability to keep customer knowledge current.
Products are changing faster, and the teams responsible for helping customers use them can’t keep up. Customer education leaders I’ve spoken with say they get, at best, an hour’s notice before new functionality is released. At worst, they learn about changes after customers do. That leaves no time to update courses, docs, or help articles before customers start asking questions.
Customers feel that gap. A new feature may be live, but if they can’t find reliable guidance on how to use it, they can’t get any value from it.
Ignore these shifts, and the numbers show it: customers stop trusting your information, adoption slows, and churn follows.
I believe the next evolution of customer success needs a new foundation, one built on customer knowledge.
By customer knowledge, I mean three things: what a business knows about its customers, what customers need to know about its product, and what the business learns from their questions. It takes all three to give a customer an answer that’s accurate and relevant to them. But today they live in different places. What’s missing is a governed AI knowledge layer that brings all three together and decides what to trust.
That’s why we built our Customer Knowledge AI Platform and introduced Lens.
A governed knowledge layer sits at the platform’s core. It instantly connects to the systems a business already uses, so nothing has to move or be rebuilt. It automatically finds conflicts and outdated information. And it lets the business set the rules for what customers and AI agents can trust.
Lens is the new AI product that powers it. Knowledge agents flag where information conflicts and follow the governance rules you set in plain language. That way, your customers get answers they can trust, wherever they are. Every question they ask teaches you what they need next.
Thought Industries Academy is part of the platform too. It’s where customers build deeper expertise, and it’s one of the sources Lens draws from. When a quick answer isn’t enough, Lens points customers there.
My product background taught me never to lose sight of what customers are trying to do. People buy a product to get something done, and it’s our job to help them get there.
Customers should never have to sort through conflicting or outdated information to succeed with a product. That responsibility belongs to the business, not the customer.
I believe the companies that lead in this next era of AI won’t be the ones with the most answers. They’ll be the ones customers trust to give the right answer at the right moment, and to help them take the next step.
That’s what we’re building with our Customer Knowledge AI Platform. And we’re just getting started.
Where does disconnected knowledge create the most friction in your customer journey?
