How to create articles using Salesforce Knowledge Base

What is Knowledge Base?

The Salesforce Knowledge base is built from knowledge articles, which are documents of information. Articles can include information on the process, like how to reset your product to its defaults, or frequently asked questions, like how much storage your product supports.

Experienced service agents and internal writers write the articles. The articles are then published and can be used internally or externally in a range of channels. You can publish articles on customer and partner sites and public websites or share articles in social posts and emails.

Control where and what information is published or shared based on the article page layouts, user profiles, actions, and other settings. This license is not available in every org. It is a Service Cloud feature.

Benefits of the knowledge base

1. It helps internal users to learn company processes or policies without any support and also agents can support clients with particular cases which have been asked repeatedly.
2. Customers who are reaching out to the company for help don’t have to wait for the agent to clarify them. They can solve their queries by using knowledge articles.

Knowledge base and Article Creation

1. Before creating articles, it is better to organize the categories into data groups. Analyze the company products or teams and create data groups based on that.
2. Let’s see an example If your company has two teams Web developers and Salesforce Developers. Some articles will be helpful to specific teams and some articles have to be shared between both teams. In this case, data groups will be helpful.
3. Before creating articles in the knowledge base first we have to decide the users who should have access to the knowledge articles that is, who are all need licenses. Internal users can read the articles without a license. To modify or create articles, that user should have a specific license.

Steps to assign Knowledge User License to a specific user

1. Setup -> Quick find box ->Users
2. Click Users -> click the username of the user.
3. Edit and select Knowledge User ->Save.

After assigning a Knowledge user license for a user, knowledge has to be enabled for a specific org. Once Knowledge has been enabled, we can’t turn it off.

Steps to Enable Knowledge in a production org

1. Setup-> Quick find box -> Enter Knowledge Settings
2. Select Knowledge Settings ->Select Enable Lightning Knowledge.

Setup knowledge with a guided flow

Rather than assigning the article user and data categories manually, we can use the knowledge setup flow to automatically assign the data groups.

1. From Setup menu -> Service Setup.
2. In the Service Setup Home ->Recommended setup -> click View All
3. In the search enter Knowledge Setup and select it.
4. In the Data Category Group text box enter the category name. Example: Salesforce Team
5. In the Data Category text box enter the sub-teams of the salesforce team. Example: Admin, Developer, Marketing. -> click Finish.

Knowledge Article Creation

After assigning the license to users as article authors and enabling the knowledge base for the org. Now the author can create his/her own article. Let’s see the steps:

1. Click the App Launcher icon-> Service console -> select Knowledge
2. Click New -> Choose the record type for the article(FAQ/Procedure) -> FAQ -> click Next.
3. Enter the article title in the title field -> Salesforce Configuration Best Practices.
4. Provide the same name or any name in the URL field.
5. For Validation status -> Choose Work in progress.
6. In the summary field -> Provide the summary of the article(This will show in the Knowledge search results).
7. Click Save.

Now the new article has been created, but we have to specify the question and answer for the article.

1. In the Knowledge tab, click the article name and edit -> In the question text box click edit and enter the question.
2. In the answers text box, enter the answer for the question and click save.
3. Click publish button on the right side to publish the article.

Workflow Rule to review articles

• Admin can also set up the workflow rule to review the articles after getting published by another user. Let’s see an example:
• Create a user with a Standard User profile. And while creating enable the Knowledge User checkbox so that the knowledge base will be accessible for that user to modify or create new articles in the org.
• If this Standard user profile user published an article, an email has to be sent to the admin user to review the article. Let’s create a workflow rule.

In trial org, we can’t have the privileges to check this for the standard users.