Salesforce lightning knowledge gives the ultimate support tool to agents, customers, partners, and website visitors the ultimate support tool. A knowledge base is simply a collection of articles with relevant information about the products and services, to inspire a self-service model for customers to solve their own queries, which leads to case deflection. It is now known to all that Salesforce Lightning has established its presence everywhere, so Salesforce Knowledge is no exception. In this blog, CloudVandana will let the visitors know the basics of Lightning Knowledge so that users can plan when they are migrating from classic or rolling things out for the first time.

Salesforce Lightning Knowledge

All internal users with reading permissions can read knowledge articles. But to publish, archive, delete, and manage articles, users need additional permissions. If users have been using Knowledge for a while in Salesforce Classic, then they can use Lightning Knowledge Migration Tool to convert the Classic Knowledge articles into Lightning.

Licensing

The licensing requirements for knowledge depend on the edition of Salesforce. With few 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.

Access Considerations

The data of Lightning Knowledge is different from the classic knowledge, so the access is also different. In lightning knowledge, all articles are on a single Salesforce object. This object is called Knowledge. Users can read, create, edit, and delete articles based on their knowledge permissions. But special lightning Knowledge User Permissions primarily focus on Publishing, Archiving, And translating.

The Knowledge Lifecycle

The knowledge Lifecycle is cyclical and stresses continuous improvements to content. To support the Knowledge Lifecycle, Lightning Knowledge has introduced version control. Now every article will have a version number, and whenever the user needs to make changes to a published article, the user can edit it as a new version and then republish it.

Articles Distribution

Once the articles are published, users can share them with a huge audience through various channels. The audience is segmented into 4 groups.

Internal Users
Partners
Customers
General audience

The internal channel is for internal users only. This type of content includes company policies, onboards, and internal Salesforce process documentation.

Partner shares the content with partner licensed users within a Partner Community. This content includes sales process, guidelines, tips, and tricks for selling, or product updates.

Customer channel is one of the most important channels as it is critical for customer self-service and case deflection. It is ideal for customer-facing FAQs, troubleshooting articles, and step-by-step guides.

The public channel exposes the knowledge content to guest users. There are Salesforce AppExchange Apps that enable audiences to expose public knowledge articles on non-Salesforce pages.

Approval Processes

An approval process can be created for articles. This is invaluable for controlling the published content, especially, if the content needs to be screened for customer-facing articles. The approval process for knowledge articles works more or less like any other article, but there are a few approval actions that are distinctive to knowledge- Knowledge Actions.

Features

Rating

Rating is an important feature of Salesforce knowledge. Rating lets the users rate the content. In Salesforce Classic, the rating system was a 1-5 star rating, but in Salesforce Lightning Knowledge, it is a thumbs-up or thumbs-down rating system. These voting buttons can be added or removed from pages as needed so the author can control who can vote on what article. For Lightning Pages, the Article Thumb Vote component provides voting options to the users.

Data Categories

One of the important features of Salesforce Knowledge is Data Categories and Data Category Groups. These are two major functions-article organization and article access. Data categories allow the user to organize the article content in a hierarchical way. They can be grouped into Data Category Groups.

Topics

Adding topics lets the user easily classify them based on their content and provides easier searching within the knowledge base. Topics are generally different from Data Categories as they don’t drive article access in any way, and they are not hierarchical.

So this was an overview of Salesforce Knowledge. Do you have any queries or suggestions regarding this article? Please feel free to take a consultation call with CloudVandana for any Salesforce-related requirements.