Salesforce Knowledge Base: Introduction and Implementation

Organizations can build their own knowledgebase inside Salesforce and serve their customers, partners and agents through Salesforce knowledge base or KB. Salesforce knowledge base is simply a collection of articles, product information and the service description of the organization. KB or knowledge base is basically a collection of data and information through which customers can serve themselves and resolve their queries. So in short Salesforce knowledge base implementation can save your time and money invested in hiring information agents on the phone.

This article covers an introduction to the knowledge base and list of a few questions which will help you in deciding that whether you should implement Salesforce or not.

An Introduction to Salesforce Knowledge Base

Salesforce knowledge base is a collection of knowledge in the form of articles. This article collection can be beneficial for the organizations in many ways. This knowledge base can be accessed by obtaining a license from the company. Salesforce provides a knowledge base license for the administrator or the knowledge base creator of the organization.

How to Share Articles on Knowledge Base?

When your knowledge base gets ready then you can share it with your partners, customers and other users. Salesforce has provided four channels for sharing articles depending on the role and type of users. These channels are:

Internal
Partner
Customer
Public Knowledge Base

As per the requirement, organizations can provide access to the appropriate user. Like in case of internal access, all internal users of Salesforce can access the knowledge base. From the search bar user can access any article related to any particular category. While in case of partner level access, user can share articles via partner community and explore partner related content. While through customer channel user can explore Salesforce customer community. Through public knowledge base channel the articles can be published publicly.

Features of Salesforce knowledge Base

Salesforce knowledge base has lots of features and is a powerful tool which helps your customers, partners and employees to get the most out of the stored information. Apart from the above-listed features Salesforce knowledge base provides the following additional features:

Widget Knowledge One: This widget suggests best service based articles for service reps. The user cannot only view the article, but also attach them to cases and send in PDF format. One example is shown below:

Polling or Voting: Internal community users can vote for an article. For voting there are two options, one is star rating and other is thumbs up and down. Through this voting relevance of the article can be decided which can help the user to assess the article quality.

Types of Articles: An article as per its content can be categorized in a particular category like How to article, question and answer articles or articles with visual text fields. You can select the category for your article as per its content.

Apart from the above-listed features Salesforce knowledge base has many other functionalities and features. These features can be advantageous for Sales reps, Service reps and other Salesforce users. Some of the other advantageous features are:

Article Creation from Cases
Data Categorization
Article Approval

The following figure showed a preview of Salesforce Knowledge Base:

Five Considerable Questions to Implement Salesforce Knowledge Base

So after getting familiar with Salesforce knowledge base now it’s time to implement it. In order to implement Salesforce knowledge base you must answer certain questions to leverage the platform. Following questions will help you in successful knowledge base implementation:

1). Which types of Articles Does Your Organization Require?

If your organization and its customers belong to any particular category, then you can put and access the article from a particular category. Through data categories you can assign an appropriate category for your article. You can segment your data as per its content like segmentation as per any particular region or as per product line or any other categorization.

Here any categorization can only be performed up to three levels. For each and every article you must know its category and assign it properly so that your user can easily access it. By proper categorization you can not only implement knowledge base smartly but also grant appropriate permission to your user depending on his category.

2). How do you want to control your article?

In order to create, edit and publish any new article or to launch a series of articles you must have a pre-defined publishing plan. You can also ask for a guest post or ask your employees to publish articles.

Herein any of such situation you must have control over publishing any of the articles. For this you can appoint an article manager, who must be responsible for article publishing. He can review the article and post that in the corresponding category.

3). How will you use Article Rating?

The Salesforce knowledge base can help the organizations in publishing their articles. They can maintain and manage the quality of their published articles. For this they can use article rating feature and generate rating or performance reports for the articles.

There are separate tools on AppExchange to create the article reports based on the rating and number of times they are downloaded or viewed by the customers. Here the user can generate the report based on article performance or on the basis of the roles of the user.

4). Does your organization need multiple Knowledge Base channels?

You can share your articles through the above listed four channels in the Salesforce knowledge base. These channels have separate users or the users from a different category. So make sure that your organization will leverage these channels.

Internal, partner, customer or public depending on the type and privacy level of the article you should categorize your article and put it in the appropriate category. As per their roles the appropriate category of the article can be accessed and published.

5). Why are you Implementing Salesforce knowledge Base?

However, this question may look obvious, but still you must know clearly that why you want to implement knowledge base? The Specific implementation reason may help you leverage it. There may be any reason for this like:

Are you implementing it to provide easy data access to your internal employees?
Do you want to help your call center executives so that they can serve the customers in a well informative manner?
Do you want to promote your product along in an informative way to the public?

Enlisting your reason may help you to create an appropriate article publishing plan. You can write and publish the articles as per your plan and provide t=its access to the appropriate user.

Final Words

Salesforce knowledge base is a powerful tool to create and manage the articles. Any organization which wants to implement it, must keep it simple and manage it properly. In order to leverage it, they must have complete knowledge of the tools and features of Salesforce knowledge base. The planned implementation of this knowledge base can help in leveraging this tool. Even all users can get the complete product information and communities can know the organizational strategies.