The Ultimate Guide to Setting Up Salesforce Knowledge
Salesforce Knowledge gives you the ability to build out a comprehensive Knowledge Base (KB) inside of Salesforce to service your internal agents, partners and customers. A Knowledge Base is simply a collection of articles with relevant information about your products and services, to encourage a self-service model for your customers to solve their own queries, which leads to case deflection (and as a result, hiring less service agents, and increasing customer satisfaction).
As you probably know, Salesforce Lightning has “struck” almost everywhere, and Salesforce Knowledge is no exception. Lightning Knowledge is a major reworking of the Classic Knowledge features and is more than just a change in UI. This blog introduces you to the basics of Lightning Knowledge so you can plan your roll-out and know somethings to expect whether you’re migrating from Classic or rolling things out for the first time!
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Key Points — What you need to knowBefore we dive into the fun features of Lightning Knowledge, let’s knock out a few housekeeping items first that you’ll need to know.
1. Lightning Knowledge Migrations from Classic Knowledge
If you’re currently using Classic knowledge, this article will certainly help you plan out and organize your Lightning Knowledge setup. However, there are a few more considerations that you need to be aware of if you’re migrating to Lightning Knowledge and not just implementing it fresh. These details go beyond the scope of this post, but if you are interested in a Lightning Knowledge Migration, Internet Creations can help get you started.
2. Licensing
The licensing requirements for Knowledge are dependent on the edition of Salesforce you’re on and which clouds you have. For Essentials and Unlimited editions, Lightning Knowledge is available as a part of Service Cloud for no additional cost. For Professional, Enterprise, Performance, and Developer editions, Lightning Knowledge does have an additional cost associated. Contact your Salesforce Account Executive for more information on pricing.
3. Access Considerations
The Lightning Knowledge data model is very different from the Classic Knowledge data model, so the access is also fairly different. In Lightning Knowledge, all articles are on a single Salesforce object called Knowledge (Knowledge__kav) by default (you can actually rename if you want, not just relabel!)
Different article types are kept as Record Types, like any other Salesforce object. For example, you may have an FAQ record type, a Troubleshooting record type, and a News record type for the different types of content you want to organize. We’ll discuss that in more detail later.
Since everything works like a normal Salesforce object, access is given in much the same way. Users can read, create, edit, and delete articles based on their Knowledge object permissions. The main thing that gets tricky are the special Lightning Knowledge User Permissions that primarily focus on Publishing, Archiving, and Translating draft article versions. For a detailed breakdown of these permissions, Salesforce Help has a great table summarizing the permissions and their purposes.
Content ManagementThe Knowledge Lifecycle and Versioning
Giving your team access to provide feedback either via chatter comments, ratings, or (for super users/authors) directly editing drafts is critical to ensuring your knowledge base is polished for your customers. The Knowledge Lifecycle is cyclical and stresses continuous improvements to content.
To support the Knowledge Lifecycle, Lightning Knowledge has version control, which is a new feature from the Classic model. Now, each article will have a Version number and when you need to make changes to a published article, you edit it as a new version and then publish it fresh. This lets you work on new content without impacting the published version that users see.
Salesforce also provides a convenient way to compare article versions with the Article Version Comparison component (in Beta as of the Spring ’20 release).
ChannelsOnce you have your articles published, you have several channels to share them with. These channels are like audiences for your content — Internal users, Partners, Customers, and the general Public.
Internal:
The internal channel is for internal users only. This is for content that your internal user base needs access to, such as company policies, onboards, internal Salesforce process documentation, etc.
Partner:
Partner shares the content with partner licensed users within a Partner Community. This is good for content you need to share with your partners such as sales process guidelines, tips and tricks for selling, or product updates.
Customer:
Along with Public, the Customer channel is one of the most popular channels because it is critical for customer self-service and case deflection. The customer channel shares content with users on a customer community license within a Customer Community. It’s great for customer-facing FAQ, troubleshooting articles, and step-by-step guides.
Public:
The Public channel is how you expose and share knowledge content with public (guest) users. This content can be shared on a public community page or site and is accessible to unauthenticated users. There are also Salesforce AppExchange Apps that let you expose public knowledge articles on non-Salesforce pages. Like with the Customer Channel, it can be a great way to empower customers to self-help and can assist with case deflection. For example, Internet Creations implemented a customized public knowledge base for Solarwinds MSP (formerly LOGICnow) which resulted in over 1000 cases deflected in a single month. You can also publish product announcements and marketing content to share with readers who may not be a customer yet.
Approval ProcessesAs with most Salesforce objects, you can create an approval process for articles. This is invaluable for controlling what content is published, especially if you have a public knowledge base and need to screen content for customer-facing articles. The approval processes for knowledge articles work more or less like any other, but there are special approval actions that are unique to knowledge — Knowledge Actions. For example, Publish as New publishes the article as a new version.
Knowledge FeaturesRatings
One feature of Salesforce Knowledge is the ability to let your users rate the content. In Classic Knowledge this was always a 1–5 star rating, but in Lightning Knowledge it’s a simpler thumbs-up or thumbs down rating system. (When migrating, 3,4,5 stars are converted to thumbs-up and 1,2 stars are thumbs-down). These voting buttons can be added or removed from pages as needed so you can control who can vote on what kinds of articles. For Lightning Pages, the Article Thumb Vote component gives users the voting options.
In a Salesforce community, the Allow Ratings is a setting on the Article Content component for the Article Detail page, which respects your community theme colors.
Data Categories
One of the critical features of Salesforce Knowledge is Data Categories and Data Category Groups. These are two major functions — article organization and article access. Data Categories allow you to organize your article content in a hierarchical way. They can also be grouped into Data Category Groups.
Let’s look at an example of how this could be structured — let’s say you have article content for your product information. You have several categories and subcategories of your products. You also have a global market and need to divide content regionally. Here’s how this could look with Knowledge Data Categories and Data Category Groups:
With this model, regions and subregions are hierarchical in the Region Data Category Group and product lines and specific categories of offerings are hierarchical in a separate Products Data Category Group. These Data Categories can now be assigned to articles to organize content by product and by region.
Another key feature of Data Categories is article access. Data Category visibility can be controlled via profiles and permission sets to ensure users only see knowledge content relevant to them. For example, maybe your Customer Community users have regional profiles. You can restrict their access to article content that is tagged with their region’s data category only so they aren’t seeing irrelevant articles in the knowledge base.
TopicsAdding topics to articles lets you easily classify them based on content and provides easier searching within your knowledge base. Think of these like keywords. A single article can have a multitude of topics assigned depending on the content. (Just don’t over-assign topics because then searches could return irrelevant results).
Topics are different from Data Categories in that they don’t drive article access in any way and they are not hierarchical. They are primarily used to organize information within a knowledge base in a community.
Topics are assigned to articles in Content Management > Topics in the Salesforce community workspaces. There is also a setting to automatically assign topics based on certain data categories, which streamlines the tropic assignment of new articles and makes manual tagging more automated.
Case DeflectionWith customer support teams feeling overwhelmed, Salesforce can help manage the high support volume and Knowledge is one of the methods. Exposing knowledge articles to your external and public users is a great way to deflect support cases from your service agents. A robust knowledge base will empower your customers to self-service rather than flooding your case queue with questions. Salesforce makes this even better by providing the Case Deflection component for communities.
The Case Deflection component lets your users submit cases but a right-hand panel recommends knowledge articles based on the text being typed into the case. The component also generates deflection metrics so you can see how effectively the component is working.
Using Apex with KnowledgeOne final important feature of Knowledge is that it can have Apex triggers and be accessed through Apex code. In fact, there are standard apex classes relating to knowledge management that can be called in Apex for publishing, archiving, searching, and more. In Classic Knowledge this was more restrictive, but the Lightning Knowledge data architecture change included these development improvements. If you have a use case for development and Lightning Knowledge, Salesforce has more information in their developer guide.