Most Desirable Practices in Managing Salesforce Knowledge Base

Generation-Z consumers now do not rely largely on after-sales assistance in learning and understanding things. They want to enjoy self-sufficiency and independence in learning technological things. This further boosted uprise in self-service portals, which is now the mainstream in terms of technology. A Microsoft survey had also revealed that about 88 % of the participants expect a brand or service to offer self-service portals for online orientation.

Businesses of all kinds now endeavor to offer these types of help content to their customers online. However, to do it well, they first need a solid place to host their articles, ebooks, guides, translations, and other self-help materials. A well-structured knowledge base is a solution. Further, we will discuss Salesforce Knowledge and the most important things you need to know about building a knowledge base for your enterprise.

Salesforce Knowledge Base

Salesforce Knowledge is the primary Salesforce Service Cloud operational tool for user support. One major thing which that makes Salesforce Knowledge suitable for the online community is a website where the users may be able to instantly and easily find their help articles. It also offers to offer multilingual support, URL rewriting, and managing content searching a clean and brand-new interface etc. On top of all these, there is a lot of Salesforce Knowledge handy out there, which you can manage all by yourself. Even though we may advise consulting an expert organizational-wide, here we may discuss 10 top maintenance activities you can adopt to keep your knowledge base in shape.

Define the article types

Before publishing any help article related to Salesforce, you have first to define at least one article type for it to be specific. Doing this will help you effectively categorize the articles under different tags like product articles, tips articles, introduction articles, advanced product articles, etc.

2. Define the target audience

Once you define the types of articles, you may try to further categorize the articles based on the audience those aim at. We may specify the target audience based on their level of experience, job profile, knowledge level, etc. As an example put forth by Flosum, if the article is meant for a data scientist or a sales manager, you can further categorize it at beginner level, intermediate level, expert level, etc. You may try to define all these categories first manually and then check out the corresponding field while the article is published.

3. Edit and update

Salesforce Knowledge also includes some advanced edit options. You can easily make your changes to an article, which is already published. While editing an existing article, you can also choose between taking a published version offline, edit it, and republish it. You may also keep the article online and do inline editing of the draft version to replace the outdated version on uploading the edited one.

4. Like and share

After you publish an article, you can also enable the feed tracking for your article type. You may also connect any Chatter activity to this article as a post, like a share, and social media platforms.

5. Manage call permissions

You may also customize the permission levels for various users by setting the article actions. Actions like adding required persons to the groups, creating public groups, assigning these groups to article actions, restricting the permissions to users, etc. By doing these, you can easily allow various users to manage article publishing and article translation, etc.

6. Integrate search – Salesforce will also let the users enjoy a better experience with various search filters like language filters, company filters, employee filters, etc. You can also add the articles by using custom search options. For example, if you are an employer searching for specific articles, use the respective tags to search for relevant articles.

7. Link various articles to different use cases

You can also use the Knowledge One widget to search. You can use Knowledge

One to search, create and send articles from any given case. You plug the Knowledge One with your Salesforce Consultant for service and then attach the published article to the given case in a single click. You can also share the article as a URL. It is possible to email the article as a PDF file.

8. Enable feedback for articles

You can also easily allow the users to rate your articles by using either the thumbs up or thumbs down method or by rating it with stars (1 to 5 stars). The articles may move up and down based on the rating they receive. This approach will help determine the articles’ usefulness and ensure the most relevant and helpful articles in each category.

9. Enabling multi-lingual feature

Salesforce knowledge base also provides user-location-based redirection to different linguistic platforms. You can also translate the articles into various languages, and Knowledge Base will show them to the users in their preferred language based on their geographical region.

We discussed some of the basics of Salesforce Knowledge management that you can practice or on your own. Along with these, you can find a lot more as you start to explore the Knowledge Base in more detail. This involves skinning the knowledge base, implementing features like federated search, and taking knowledge into the supported cloud.

At Salesforce, there are many consultants, cloud architects, and support specialists who process extensive experience working on Salesforce cloud platforms to set up all these features and functionality for the knowledge base. With their expertise in scanning the knowledge base and cloud integration, they can effectively help organizations and users maximize their returns on Salesforce investment and lend excellent customer support.

Being a new Salesforce user, you can assist these support services provided by the third-party Salesforce consultants who may offer you all these benefits over a comprehensive support package. Ensure that you have knowledge about how and what to do. However, while considering a Salesforce consultant, you need to be very careful about considering a professionally experienced and reliable provider possessing a significant level of experience in Salesforce administration.