The millennials and Gen-Z consumers do not like relying on the sales reps for assistance when they explore new technology. They want to be more independent and explorative to be self-sufficient. This further lead to the need for a self-service knowledge repository, which had gone mainstream lately. A Microsoft survey had shown that about 88% of the respondents said that they expect the technology brands to offer online self-service portals for technology orientations. They like to see what is on offer and based on their experience and user review like to make the final selection.
The modern-day businesses endeavor to offer extensive help content to their customers through video tutorials and self-service guided access. However, to achieve this, you need a commonplace to store all your articles, guides, e-books, translations, and other helpful content. A well-managed knowledge base in the ideal solution here.
Why Salesforce Knowledge surpasses the others in this need?
Salesforce Knowledge is the No.1 pick of enterprises across the globe, which is there in the Salesforce Service Cloud, which functions as your fundamental support operation tool. The primary aspect which makes Salesforce knowledge the favorite choice for enterprise website and online community is that it is much easier to find the help articles through this quickly. It offers multilingual support too. The other features of Salesforce Knowledge include but not limited to the URL rewriting to search and manage content, UI/UX Skinning for a compliant and clean look.
On top of all these, there are also a lot of additional features available in the Salesforce Knowledge which you can manage by yourself. It is always advisable to consult an expert for any advanced changes. It may always be confusing for the beginners to set up the Salesforce Knowledge and how to build the knowledge base to cover all essentials needed for your enterprise operations. For the basic ones, here we will discuss ten maintenance activities to try out.
Define the types of articles
Before publishing the help articles, always define at least one of the Article Type. This will help you to categorize the items in various types as easily;
- Quick Tips
- Product Orientation
- User instructions etc.
Define the target users
Next, you can also categorize the article based on the audience it targets. As their job profile, experience level, technology expertise, etc. Sometimes, the articles may be meant for the data scientists or some other times for the sales team. It could also be for a beginner, an expert, or for an intermediate to refer to. You can first try to manually define these categories and crosscheck the same while publishing the article.
Draft, review, publish, and archive
While creating an article for the Salesforce Knowledge, get it saved first in the draft version. To publish it to Knowledge Base, you can hit the publish button once the review is over, and the article is approved for publishing. When you publish it, one can choose where to publish like an internal app or with the partners or the customers. There is also a public Knowledgebase, and it is also possible to select the ‘Archive’ option at the Knowledge Management Tab to archive the article.
Edit the article and update
You can also find features for editing and updating your content in Salesforce Knowledge. Just make the changes to the articles published anytime. Similar to SF DevOps, it is possible or you to choose between:
- Choosing an offline version of the published document and edit it as a draft to edit and republish.
- You may also access the online version and edit it directly.
Share and get likes
Once publishing the article, one can also enable the ‘Feed Tracking’ option for the specific article type given. Once it is on, you can then do any Chatter activity with it as sharing and liking the post on the detail page. This is a wonderful feature in this social media era to take your content to more beneficiaries easily and get acknowledged.
Manage the given permissions
While operating the Salesforce Knowledge, it is also possible for the administrators to set and manage the access permissions for various users. Just go to the Article Actions to enable it. You can create public groups and add the required persons for specific groups to Article Actions for restricted permissions. With this, you can let various users view, edit, delete, or translate the articles, etc.
Integrated search:
Salesforce allows a far better user experience with various filters available as employee, language, and company filters. The publishers can only tag the articles using custom keywords. So, someone searching for it later can correctly use these generic tags to get access to the most relevant articles.
Link the articles to use cases
You can use the widget of Knowledge One to search, create, and share articles for the given Case. Plug Salesforce Knowledge One widget to the console and attach your published articles to the Case by sharing the article URL or the PDF file.
Enable comment, poll, and feedback
You can also let the users comment, rate, or give feedback on the articles using thumbs up, star rating, etc. Based on the rating received from the users, your articles may move up or down in popularity. This will help determine the usefulness of the articles so that they get hold of the most relevant articles on top.
Enable the multilingual feature
Knowledgebase also offers geo-location-based language services to users. It is easy for the users to translate articles into their choice of language as the Knowledgebase is multilingual.
The above mentioned 10 points are deemed to be the basics of Salesforce Knowledgebase management, which you need to be through with. This is just the beginning, and there are many more steps and processes to ensure proper administration of Knowledgebase. You may also try to change skins, implement federated searches, and sync the Knowledge with Salesforce Support Cloud and more.