Salesforce Knowledge Part-1

Despite our efforts of fixing the issues,sometimes we just have to call the companies first line of defense for help- whether it’s a connectivity issue, broken device, product return or billing questions and it is even more interesting to see the service rep’s answering your questions in seconds. What is the trick? Can they learn so much of data? Of course not, they have access to the articles that provide them with the necessary info required to resolve the issue. It is the knowledge base management system which is primarily used by the customer service department and this can be a standard or a custom application built, depending on the size of the company. Every department relies on some sort of documentation to facilitate work and so this knowledge base system is often shared between departments and internal employees which keeps them organized and well managed.

Its time for you to get rid of all the legacy knowledge base systems and migrate all your articles to salesforce. Imagine support agents  will no longer have to switch between multiple applications for articles and there would be no more hassle of integrating legacy systems because you can implement knowledge within salesforce. Yes, knowledge is a product provided by salesforce which becomes the central library of information in your organization that the support team's use to resolve customer issues. 

With Knowledge you can- 

• Write, edit, publish and achieve articles.
• Attach articles to open and closed cases.
• Share articles in the form of PDF or links with the customers
• Attach articles to open and closed cases
• Enable articles to authors, reviewers, publisher, customers, partners, public website visitors and other team members.

What are we going to learn today?

Use Case: 1-2-3 SFDC would like to work with you on implementing knowledge with article management process. 1-2-3 SFDC deals with manufacturing of software and hardware products, service reps have to deal with a lot of customers answering their product related questions. Newly discovered issues with their solution are documented and added to the FAQ section. Product related information can be found under product manuals.

The three main target audience for this implementation is call center rep, knowledge manager and sales rep. Call center reps create articles while working on cases, search or preview articles. Knowledge Manager reviews the articles submitted by call center reps. Knowledge database will also be used by other internal users like Sales reps would search articles and attach them to cases. 

We will come back to our use case later, let us first implement knowledge in our org.

Ask this before implementing Knowledge:

• How many article types do you need?
• Which fields do you want on each article type?
• How do you want the published article to appear?
• Who should have access to your knowledge base?
• Which data categories do you need?
• Do you want to set up workflow rules or approval processes?
• Do you want to support articles in multiple languages?
• Do you want agents working on cases to find, create, and send articles?
• Do you want members of your answers community to promote replies to articles?
• Do you need to import articles from an existing knowledge base into Salesforce Knowledge?
• Do you want Customer Portal users to have access to articles?
• Do you want partner portal users to have access to articles?
• Do you want to create a public knowledge base on your website?
• Do you want users to search using synonym groups?

Let us learn step by step how to implement Knowledge for 1-2-3 SFDC use case.

Step1: Enable Salesforce Knowledge

Since you are the administrator to implement knowledge for 1-2-3 SFDC org, enable knowledge permission on your profile by checking the knowledge user box. 

Step2: Create an Article types

Article has a similar object behavior. Specify the properties for your article type like label, description. From Setup, click Customize > Knowledge > Article Types.

Note: You cannot enable salesforce knowledge until one article is not created

Step3: Create Custom Field on Article

Article types have only three fields-

1. Summary
2. Title
3. URL

You need a text field on your article type where users/ authors can write the body of your article. We are going to add a new field on product article type as “description”. Data type for this field is text rich area which gives us plenty of room to fill in product description for the article. 

Step4: Modify the Layout

Article type layout is what your users will see while creating articles. As an admin depending on the requirement of the company you can add custom fields. For our use case, we will provide a new section product specification and add description field so that users can easily provide product details here. 

Now go to edit layout and add a new section on the product manual page layout 

Name this new section as "Product Specification". Drag and drop the description field from the palette. 

Please Note: Article Number, Summary, Title and URL are read only fields and do not display on the page layout. 

Choose a Template for your Article Type

Select the article type detail page and scroll down to the "Channel Display" section.
Edit and select the appropriate template for Internal App, Partner, Customer and Public Knowledge Base. I am accepting the default settings as shown in the screen shot. These can also be changed later as per requirements.

Assuming you are an admin you can assign permissions to the users depending on their day to day activities w.r.t articles. Now that you have created article, you are all set to enable knowledge for 1-2-3 SFDC org. Why didn't you enable knowledge before? Because in order to enable knowledge you need at least one article type created in your organization. Perfect! Let's jump on a new post Salesforce Knowledge Part-2 to learn how to enable knowledge.