Salesforce Knowledge helps businesses provide fast and immediate assistance to customers and drives customer satisfaction. It also empowers customer service agents with information to handle queries and answer customers satisfactorily. Let’s discuss what is Salesforce Knowledge Base, its features, and best practices in Salesforce Knowledge to help you maximize ROI from your investments.

Do you love waiting for your turn on a chat or phone to get assistance from a customer support executive? I’m sure you aren’t. According to a 2019 report by The Northridge Group, customers want an easy path to resolve their product and service issues and yet more than one-third of customers find it difficult to even establish contact with the company. The report further reveals that 68% of customers experience a long wait time to reach an agent, and 57% have to repeat themselves to the agent to explain the issue. 

In short, companies need to step up their game in customer support. It’s even more needed amidst the global pandemic when customer support teams experience with reduced staff and other challenges. In an interconnected, digital-driven world customers expect instant gratification and immediate assistance – a tall order for any company of any size! 

If your business is also grappling with the same issue while looking for a solution or a way to provide fast and quality customer service, then Salesforce Knowledge can be an effective solution. It not only helps your customers get immediate assistance via self-help but also assists your customer support team quickly resolve customer queries by providing them with quick information.

What is Salesforce Knowledge?

Salesforce Knowledge is a part of the Salesforce Service Cloud and helps businesses build a knowledge base or knowledge management system consisting of articles, FAQs, and other helpful information. It also allows customers to answer questions from other community members and benefit from collective wisdom. With Salesforce Knowledge content, you can quickly build a knowledge base for your customers with ease.

Experienced agents and subject matter experts can write articles, answer FAQs, etc. for common customer issues. The Salesforce Knowledge articles

or FAQs are then published in the knowledge base and can be used in a range of channels like the website, emails, or social posts. Salesforce Knowledge Base gives businesses complete control on where and what content is published or shared based on the user profiles, article page layouts, actions, and other settings.

What is a Knowledge Base?

A “knowledge base” is a centralized library or repository where information on a company’s products/services such as installation guides, troubleshooting guides, and FAQs, etc., is created and stored, organized, and then internally and externally shared. 

Externally, you can use the knowledge base as a self-help portal for your customers to go learn more about your offerings and get information to troubleshoot issues they are experiencing. Internally, the knowledge base is useful in assisting your agents or field service executives to quickly resolve customer issues.

Salesforce Knowledge Features

The Salesforce Knowledge Base is helpful for your agents as it provides them with the following features to drive productivity:

1. Optimized search helps them quickly find articles while talking to a customer.
2. Refines the search results with filters or data categories.
3. Reviews each article’s title, summary, and properties to modify and update the article.
4. Edits, publishes, archives, deletes, follows, attaches to the case, or sends as a PDF to the customer for further reference.
5. Provides statistics and reports to identify most read articles and extracts insights on common issues faced by customers.
6. Reviews customer searches to find missing information and creates new articles on the topics.

Why Salesforce Knowledge Over Other Knowledge Management Solutions?

While the market is flooded with knowledge management solutions of all types, Salesforce Knowledge scores over other choices. Companies that use Salesforce Knowledge have rated it high for user satisfaction and ease of use. It is easy to integrate if you’re already using Salesforce CRM, and you can centralize all your operations and data which further drives collaboration between various departments. The Salesforce Knowledge license cost is also affordable as it offers flexible monthly subscription plans to accommodate the needs and budgets for companies of all sizes.

5 Tips for Using Salesforce Knowledge

Salesforce Knowledge can ease a lot of the burden of your customer support. However, to make the most from your investments and use it optimally, there are a few best practices to follow: 

1. Define Article Types

Salesforce Knowledge allows you to define each article and categorize them for easy search. The Salesforce Knowledge articles need to be defined in the correct way for an optimized search. So, set up rules and guidelines for publishers on how to define/categorize articles based on the topic and its utility

2. Define Target Audience

Defining the target audience of the article makes it quickly accessible to the relevant audience. You can define the target audience in various ways including job profile, experience level, etc. 

3. Edit and Update

It is important to keep updating your articles. Salesforce Knowledge allows you to edit offline as well as live so you can go for both planned and unplanned updating of information.

4. Manage Permissions

Salesforce Knowledge management permissions allow you to control access and give rights to employees in your company. All internal users by default get the ‘Read’ permission to the published articles. You can assign permissions to those authors who will publish, archive, delete, and manage articles.

5. Enable Feedback on Articles

Feedback is a great way to know how helpful your articles have been to the customers. This will help you create better quality and more helpful content. So, enable feedback on articles wherein readers can rate/vote on the articles, and monitor them regularly to assess the performance of your articles.

Need a Salesforce Partner to Help With Migration to Salesforce Knowledge?

AppShark can help! We are a Salesforce Gold Consulting and Product Development partner with 450+ projects and experience working with companies across industry verticals. 

Our 100+ certified Salesforce Consultants have the experience and expertise to help you with the implementation, customization, integration, and the migration of Salesforce Knowledge or any other Salesforce product. Please contact us and we’ll schedule a call soon.