Salesforce Knowledge Base: 3 Ways to Break Down Information Silos

My cousin, a fellow Salesforce user, recently asked me an interesting question. He told me he was struggling to “get

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My cousin, a fellow Salesforce user, recently asked me an interesting question. He told me he was struggling to “get things out of [his] team's brains and into something easily accessible, and almost immediately useful.” His question: What’s the Salesforce-centered answer to this issue?

I immediately recommended a Salesforce knowledge base.

Knowledge serves as a living, breathing content library that your organization builds and maintains for the benefit of your employees, partners and customers. Each article can contain rich text, images and files, making it a great medium to store FAQs, flow diagrams, tables of information and more. You can build your knowledge base to be searchable, taggable, filterable, multilingual and integrated into public-facing portals.

Countless use cases exist for a Salesforce knowledge base, but most of them fall into three standard categories, ranging from wholly internal use to external sharing.

3 Use Cases for a Salesforce Knowledge Base

1. Build an internal reference library of best practices and organizational knowledge.

This use case strikes at the heart of my cousin’s question. Any business contains riches of organizational knowledge that’s often locked inside individual minds and hard drives. Putting this information in a knowledge base distributes it quickly and speeds the employee onboarding process. Here’s a quick list of some internal documents that you can make available to your teams through a knowledge base:

  • Contact lists
  • Internal process flow diagrams
  • Call scripts
  • Company policies and handbooks
  • Common onboarding forms
  • Strategic documents, such as SWOT analysis or visioning session results

The best part? The typical customizability of Salesforce security settings applies to Knowledge as well, meaning that you can make some types of articles generally available to employees while locking down other categories to particular teams.

2. Arm your support agents with a wealth of information during customer interactions.

With this point, we’re delving into the bread and butter of Knowledge: using it as a customer service tool. Any customer-facing team is continuously bombarded with a variety of questions, so it pays to have common answers documented in a single shared pool. Using a Salesforce knowledge base for this purpose builds consistency among your service agents and enables them to solve cases 48% faster. It can hold the answers to numerous questions — common and rare alike — such as “How do I answer this specific question?” “To whom do I refer billing questions?” and “How do I handle calls with irate customers?”

What’s more, Knowledge integrates seamlessly with Service Cloud. As support agents enter and work cases, they can browse recommended articles, attach them to cases and email article text to customers, all on one screen. These capabilities make it easy for your support agents to incorporate knowledge articles into your everyday customer support experience.

3. Help your customers help themselves by publishing articles externally.

Of course, your customers don’t necessarily need to call your support agents to benefit from your Salesforce knowledge base. You can also publish articles publicly through a Salesforce customer community or another type of portal. This solution saves your service reps time and energy by allowing your customers to answer their own questions instead of calling in every time they encounter an issue.

And you precisely control what’s visible to the public. Even with this solution, you can choose to display articles internally only. So you can refine posts by sharing them with your internal team until you’re sure they’re client ready.

We recommend getting the most out of a Salesforce Knowledge base by using it in all of these ways, if applicable. No matter how you utilize it, however, it offers the same core advantage: Getting organizational data out of the silos it sits in now and sharing it with the people who need it most.

Have more questions about what Knowledge can do for your organization? Drop us a line so we can help you out!

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Danielle Sutton