Salesforce Knowledge Comprehensive Service Cloud Review

Salesforce Knowledge is a reliable cloud-based information-sharing platform that facilitates the understanding of key players in a business. This acts as both a CRM and salesforce information system that connects sales agents with customers and companies with other partners and stakeholders in the business

Have you ever experienced a sales agent not responding to a query? Have you ever find it challenging to search for the right information about the right product or service in one place? Have you ever seen one platform to boost the knowledge of our salesforce as well as your customer?

Have you ever seen all-purpose knowledge-based data that helps all the key players in a business? If not, let us introduce you to one!

Have you ever read the phrase, “Knowledge is key to success“? As reading imparts knowledge, your workplace always needs data and articles to increase knowledge about relevant topics.

Here is a complete review of how salesforce helps integrate all the stakeholders on one platform for implementing Knowledge Base.

Salesforce Knowledge implementation guide

The implementation guide entails all the essential aspects of knowledge-based that connects the partners, employees, and customers with one Knowledge Base.

• First, you implement Knowledge Settings

• Choose either you want to open an account using company information or personal information

• Then Click on Knowledge Settings

How to enable Salesforce Knowledge

• Once you have selected knowledge settings from the Quiz Box
• Select Confirm on the terms that you understand the impact of enabling Salesforce Knowledge. Now click on Enable Salesforce Knowledge and lastly choose OK in the dialogue box
• To select your general settings click OK
• You will now choose Allow users so that they can create or edit articles from the source
• If you do not want to go to Article Management tab, choose the Article tab to allow your coordinators and employees to edit articles
• To add Validation Status field to validate all articles, select Validation Status Field

This helps to attach only approve articles to cases, and not the ones that are not approved for the users.

• To make customer and internals users access the summaries of articles in the article list table, choose Internal App and Customer
• To choose Knowledge One options, click on the default settings
• If you want your writers and organization to produce articles in one language, select the Default Knowledge Base Language

Now you land into creating a cloud-based knowledge management tool with the help of Knowledge Base.

Salesforce Knowledge Base

The Salesforce Knowledge Base is an efficient knowledge management system that helps resolve queries and provide critical information to external users and internal employees. This gives you a database, of articles, FAQs, and other important information relevant to your business.

Knowledge Settings After adding a company name or user name, you start setting a knowledge base.

Main features

Categorizing data

It allows fragmenting data into data categories. This helps to chart out data for each role in the organization and profiles relevant to it. This allows users to reach out for data for that category.

Here is how to do it:

• First click on Setup
• Choose Customize
• Select Data Categories
• You will see Data Category Setup
• Choose to Create New and add a name to it
• Once you create a category, many child categories can be created
• You can now activate the parent category and the entire group

Creating an article type

Article type is the type of article for any category group. To create an article type:

• Go to Setup
• Select Customize
• Then choose Knowledge
• Click Article Types
• Now create New Article Type
• Next, you can edit the category group and choose under which child category, and you want your article visible
• Click Save and Close this tab

Once an article is saved, it goes to the Draft category until published. When you click publish, it can be seen by the user under the relevant child category.

Articles for cases

After forming a comprehensive database of such articles, these can now be used for information purposes where information can be either read or shared or shared instantly with cases.

• Once the support start to receive a case, it starts searching for the article

• It will search article w.r.t Subject field of the case

• After matching the article with the Subject, It will attach the article with the case

Articles for community channels

The community channels can also use knowledge articles, and attach them to the cases they receive.

Articles for public knowledge-base channel

The Salesforce Knowledge articles can also be published on public domains. Here is how the guest users can see these articles.

• For instance, the investors will search for stock market rates of various stocks

• He/she searches this on a public domain

• Based on this search the Public Knowledge-Base Channel will pick the subject “Stocks”

• The articles related to stock and trading will start popping out

• You can also rate these articles, and based on the ratings; the articles will appear in other’s search.

Salesforce Lightning Knowledge selecting record type when creating new articles

To record various types of new articles or different material records in Salesforce Knowledge, you need to follow the following steps.

• First click on the Object Manager section
• Click on Knowledge from that section
• Select the Record Types
• Create a new Record Type of a new set of articles
• Make sure you save that Record Type

You can also customize each Record Type as you want to.

• First click on Field and Relationships
• Select New
• To set the Data Type, select Text Area Long and then go to Next
• Enter the information to tabs like Field Label, Length, and Visible Lines etc.

After creating different record types, the next is how to use div HTML for creating Knowledge Base.

How to use Div HTML in Salesforce Knowledge

These are the supported elements you can write on a notepad and directly paste to the browser rather than Article Field when editing or creating an article.

• For Chrome you can use inserts <div> tags
• For Internet Explorer inserts <p> tags
• For Firefox inserts <br> tags

If you are creating the article in one browser, and then open it with another browser, the tags may be inconsistent.

It would help if you paste it via text editor then you may find these consistently working.

In the next part, you would find what is required by the user to view the article in the portal.

What is required for a user to view Knowledge Articles within a Salesforce organization

This is how you would set up Knowledge for use with the site URL:

• If you want to join the platform as knowledge user, go to Setup, then click Users, then select Manage Users, click User Profile, and press Edit
• Now choose the knowledge user checkbox
• When you will do this step, go and find the Quick Box and set Knowledge User Profile.
• This way, you can use the existing site for searching for articles
• Once you have completed the Knowledge Setting, just click on edit. Here is the checkbox with which you can enable “Share Article via URL Settings”
• Now you can add a link to the site where you want to share articles

 To make these articles available to guest users, we have created a separate setting for Guest Users.  For Guest Users, articles that lie under Public Knowledge Base will be visible.

 Go to Setup, Click Users, and then Manage User section.

This is how you will enable it for Guest User in Salesforce Knowledge.

• First click Setup
• Go to Sites
• Then from the menu choose the sites you want your articles visible to Guest User
• Now click the Public Access tab to give the articles you choose to access to Guest User
• Go to Knowledge Base Permission Options to select that who you want to see these list of articles. Choose Guest User

• Now the Guest Users can access your articles from the relevant websites in the list

What is the difference between Salesforce Knowledge and Solutions

Here are a few differences between Salesforce Knowledge and Solutions.

• Solutions are the set of features that help you resolve customer queries while Salesforce Knowledge is to build up an article base for external customers and internal users
• Salesforce Knowledge needs your license for that while solutions are add-ons that the platorm will not charge
• Knowledge gives you to create data sets, categories, and article types while solutions do not allow you to do that
• Knowledge base comes with a lot of metrics and analytics where you can see reports on the popularity of an article or data, the viability of it to use, whereas solutions can or cannot come with these analytics
• Knowledge is more likely to get integrated with Service Cloud consoles and support teams, while solutions are not actively improved or integrated

Takeaways

In a nutshell, Salesforce Knowledge is a comprehensive plan to enhance external and internal users’ knowledge base via a cloud service. An extensive set of data and articles might help a sales agent answer queries or help an internal user and customers access their choice articles.

If you are looking to upgrade your knowledge and get business success, this is your bait!