Salesforce Knowledge Guide

Salesforce Knowledge: A complete guide

Picture of Shailly Sharma

Shailly Sharma

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Your main source of information within Salesforce is essentially a knowledge base. It was developed using knowledge articles that Salesforce users write to assist internal teams, agents, and customers in finding answers fast. FAQs, troubleshooting instructions, process guides, tutorials, and pretty much whatever your audience wants, such as resetting user settings, comprehending a product feature, or resolving an issue, can be included in these Salesforce knowledge articles.

 

To use the knowledge articles, there are numerous actions to be followed. Let’s investigate these actions. We allow your customers, agents, and Salesforce Knowledge to efficiently deliver articles to a Community Cloud site. Let’s start by learning how to provide Salesforce access to knowledge.

How to enable Salesforce Knowledge?

  • Use the path Setup->Users to navigate to the users in the org.
  • Select the Edit button and select the Knowledge User checkbox to enable the Knowledge User. then save the adjustments.
  • Navigate to the Knowledge Setting area by selecting SETUP>Feature Settings>Service>Knowledge>Knowledge Setting from the menu.
  • Click the “Enable Salesforce Knowledge” button after selecting “Yes, I understand the impact of enabling Salesforce Knowledge” from the drop-down menu.
  • Click the edit button and choose the “Enable Lightning Knowledge” checkbox to make the salesforce knowledge accessible through the Lightning experience.

The knowledge object will be visible in the object manager and accessible in the app launcher once the procedures have been completed. The next step is to write a knowledge article. 

How to connect Knowledge Article with the Data Category?

You can link your articles to Data Categories to make them more accessible.

  • In the Data Category Setup, add categories.
  • Open the article.
  • In the category area, click the down arrow.
  • Pick the appropriate category.
  • Save

This facilitates the creation of user-friendly, structured Salesforce knowledge base examples.

Using Apex, get the knowledge articles

Summary, Article, UrlName, and other data as necessary must be fetched in accordance with the query on the Knowledge__kav object in order to fetch the articles in Apex. 

Here is some code to retrieve the article from the Apex: 

Utilizing the information in the Lightning component is now your turn. 

Use the article’s content in the lightning component.

Using the class in the controller of the Lightning component (for Aura components) or the wire method of the Lightning component, the content of the article that was fetched in the Apex may now be given into the Lightning component (for Lightning Web Component). 

The material from the article must be shown exactly as it was formatted in the rich text editor while editing the knowledge article on the component’s user interface (UI) after being received into the component. 

The content will then be displayed on the experience site as the next phase. 

Utilize the component to display the article’s content on the experience site.

Simply make the component accessible on the experience sites to include the component that displays Knowledge Article content on its UI. Use the code snippet below to add the interface and make the component visible in the builder and accessible for the experience site. 

The component will be accessible in the Community Site Builder once this interface has been implemented. On any Builder page, the component can be dragged and dropped in the desired location. 

Create and maintain a knowledge base based on facts about your business and securely distribute it as required. Thanks to Salesforce Knowledge, you may swiftly deliver content to your customers and agents in a Community Cloud site. It includes knowledge articles and informational materials with process details like sites or FAQs that are useful to users and must be published.  

The sites’ content is added via a Salesforce knowledge article that is dynamically managed by the knowledge object. Various channels disseminate the range, which internal writers and seasoned customer support representatives prepare. 

Route

You have a variety of venues to share your articles with when they are published. These channels – internal users, partners, customers, and the wider public — act as audiences for your content. 

Approval Procedures

You may design an approval procedure for articles, just like you can for most Salesforce objects. This is quite useful for managing what content is released, especially if you need to filter content for customer-facing articles and have a public knowledge base. The approval procedures for knowledge articles operate more or less similar to other approval procedures, although Knowledge Actions are distinct approval procedures for knowledge. For instance, Publish as New publishes the article as a new version. 

Knowledge Features

Categories of Data

Data Categories and Data Category Groups are two essential components of Salesforce Knowledge. Article organization and article access are two crucial tasks. You can hierarchically categorise your article content using Data Categories. Additionally, they could be put into Data Category Groups. 

Let’s look at an illustration of how this may be organized. Assume you have article material for your product details. Your products are divided into several categories and subcategories. Additionally, because of the global industry, you must segment your material. How this might seem using Knowledge Data Categories and Data Category Groups is as follows:

Ratings

The capability to allow your users to rate the material is one aspect of Salesforce  Knowledge. In Classic Knowledge, this was consistently rated on a scale of 1 to 5, but in Lightning Knowledge, the rating system is just a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down. For example, 3,4,5 stars are transformed to thumbs-up upon migration, while 1,2 stars are transformed to thumbs-down. You can choose which articles are up for voting and who can do so by adding or removing these voting buttons from pages as necessary. Users can vote in Lightning Pages using the Article Thumb Vote component. 

Topics

You may categorize articles based on their content and make searching your knowledge base easier by adding subjects. Consider these as keywords. Depending on the content, a single article may have various issues allocated. (However, consider topics carefully as searches may produce irrelevant results.) 

Topics differ from Data Categories in that they are not hierarchical and do not in any way influence how articles are accessed. Instead, they are mainly employed to arrange data in a community’s knowledge base. 

Articles are allocated topics in the Salesforce community workspaces under Content Management > Topics. Additionally, there is a feature to automatically assign topics based on specific data categories, which speeds up the process of assigning subjects to new articles and eliminates the need for manual tagging. 

Case Deflection

Salesforce can assist in managing the high support volume if customer support employees feel overburdened, and Knowledge is one of the techniques. An excellent technique to divert support cases from your service agents is to make knowledge articles available to your external and public users.  

Your consumers will be able to self-serve with the help of an extensive knowledge library rather than clogging up your case line with inquiries. By providing the Case Deflection component for communities, Salesforce improves this even further. 

Your users can submit cases using the Case Deflection component, but a right-hand panel suggests knowledge articles based on the text entered the matter. Additionally, the part generates deflection measurements so you can gauge how well it is doing. 

Conclusion

Creating a strong Salesforce knowledge base enables you to provide accurate and pertinent content to your internal teams, agents, and customers. Salesforce knowledge articles, dynamic categorization, and Experience Cloud integration allow you to create an ecosystem-wide, scalable information hub.

 

A carefully thought-out Salesforce Knowledge implementation guide can help you advance your knowledge management, whether you’re looking at samples of Salesforce knowledge bases or need advice on how to organize your articles. It can also support better data quality practices, such as aligning your content structure with features like salesforce duplicate rules to maintain consistency and accuracy across records.

Frequently Asked Questions

It is a consolidated Salesforce knowledge base that contains useful content including lessons, process instructions, troubleshooting methods, and FAQs. It enables businesses to produce, manage, and distribute Salesforce knowledge articles to internal teams, customers, and agents.

You can do it by:

  • Turning on the Knowledge User box.
  • Activating Salesforce Knowledge during setup.
  • Turning on Lightning Knowledge.

The Knowledge object is accessible in Object Manager and App Launcher after it is activated.

Salesforce knowledge articles are written pieces of material designed to assist end users, such as product guides, FAQs, or troubleshooting instructions. They can be shared through various channels, classified, rated, and presented with substantial text.

Salesforce Knowledge and Experience Cloud websites work together flawlessly. Custom or standard Lightning components can be used to show articles, allowing users to read FAQs, access information, and self-serve without creating support cases.

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Picture of Shailly Sharma

Shailly Sharma

Shailly Sharma has 6 years of IT writing experience and is an expert at combining strategy and narrative. She has produced everything from long-form research to blogs and landing pages, always emphasizing reader value, authenticity, and clarity.
Picture of Shailly Sharma

Shailly Sharma

Shailly Sharma has 6 years of IT writing experience and is an expert at combining strategy and narrative. She has produced everything from long-form research to blogs and landing pages, always emphasizing reader value, authenticity, and clarity.