Every organization needs to manage the information that has to be shared internally and externally. Salesforce Knowledge can provide the knowledge base framework that can enable the organization to easily create and manage the requisite information. Even if your organization has decided to implement Salesforce Knowledge, there are certain vital questions that need answering and evaluation before commencing the implementation.
What Is the Extent of Control Required By the Organization over the Lifecycle of Articles?
While you may want to permit the support teams in the organization to create, review, edit and publish articles that can solve issues faced by customers, the extent of liberty over the process of publishing needs to be established. Salesforce Knowledge provides solutions that are flexible for article management. It is possible to choose article managers and also develop the process for obtaining managerial or legal approval for articles that may need such specific action before publication.
Is There a Requirement for Presenting Articles in Multiple Formats?
While there is no dearth of options for housing articles required for organization support, there are none that can match the quality and versatility of Salesforce Knowledge. It offers an unparalleled level of customization at the time of creating the support articles. It is possible to develop article-type layouts as well as an assortment of types of articles that can organize the articles very well.
Is There Any Requirement of Targeting Specific Audiences with Specific Article Types?
Using Salesforce Knowledge, you have the flexibility of leveraging categories of data so that specific groups can have access to relevant information. Data categories are nothing but a group of criteria that are organized into a particular hierarchy. All articles are classified according to the pre-defined groups created by you such as product, region, etc. Once the data categories have been defined and assigned to the various articles, life becomes very easy for users as they can now very easily locate the articles as per their requirement.
Is There Any Requirement by the Organization for Detailed Reports?
The advantage of Salesforce Knowledge becomes all the more obvious if your organization desires to not only provide quality support articles to agents, but also with detailed information about the usage of the support articles. This makes Salesforce Knowledge an obvious tool to deploy for maintaining and improving the knowledge base of the organization. It is possible to create customized article reports or even to install the downloadable Dashboards and Reports app that’s available on the AppExchange. Using these tools, it is possible to view the usage of articles, search statistics, and ratings both by role and channel so that the knowledge base of the organization can be proactively managed.
Does Your Organization Use Multiple Support Channels?
Salesforce Knowledge is the option of choice if there is an organizational requirement for sharing support articles with audiences apart from your internal teams. Apart from your website, Salesforce Knowledge makes it possible to use four other channels for sharing articles. While users inside the company can access the articles in Salesforce directly, partners and customers can view the articles via their respective communities. You may also want to find out if you are expected to use version control systems like SalesforceGit and SalesforceGitHub. The general public can also access support articles via the Public Base Knowledge with the app available from AppExchange.
Do Agents Need a Facility for Rating Articles?
There is an inbuilt article rating system that enables organizations to identify the articles that are useful and popular so that it continues to preserve them in the database while weeding out the ones that seem to be relatively unhelpful. The rating system permits users to use a scale of 1 to 5 to rate articles, and also assigns weights based on how recently the ratings have been done. When used with the analytics of Salesforce, the article rating system can prove to be immensely helpful in managing content and ensuring that agents know what articles are more useful.
Once you have successfully managed to address the issues enumerated above, you will be able to extract the best benefit out of the implementation of Salesforce Knowledge.