How to use Salesforce Knowledge in customer service

Knowledge articles can be, for instance, FAQ articles, a list of product ingredients, product descriptions, how-to, step-by-step instructions, and many other types of articles. With Knowledge, the articles can also be published on a customer portal, where the articles can function as self-service resources for customers.

Benefits of knowledge articles 

The idea of knowledge articles is to, first and foremost, help customer service agents solve cases faster. The agents can get help from the articles without leaving the service console, where they access customers’ messages and information.

Customer service does not need to reinvent the wheel but can reuse existing information. They can provide fast and precise answers. As the customer service agents will give similar standardised answers to customers, the customer service quality improves, and the customers will be happier.

Knowledge articles can also be handy when a company releases new products or services. As customer service does not yet have a lot of hands-on experience handling cases regarding a new product, they can refresh their memory from product-specific articles. Knowledge can also reduce the training time needed for the new and existing employees as the service agents easily access consistent and accurate information.

With Knowledge, agents can link similar cases with corresponding articles together. When there is a linkage between similar cases, agents may browse previously solved cases and get help with their cases. Linking the cases and articles grows the knowledge database and builds a foundation for improving and maintaining articles.

Knowledge articles can also help customers. It is possible to publish articles to a customer community page (made with Salesforce’s Experience Cloud) where the user/guest users may browse articles and help themselves. Self-service improves customer satisfaction, as customers can find answers fast. Self-service functions help reduce the number of similar queries to customer service and enhance case deflection.

Keeping Knowledge up-to-date

Reviewing articles often and keeping them relevant maximises the knowledge base. The knowledge base can be kept up to date by the authors. They need permission to create and update articles. An approver can revise the articles before publishing.

Knowledge can be a powerful tool to increase internal efficiency and increase the speed of onboarding with the customer receiving consistent information. Exposing knowledge articles to customers through Experience Cloud can increase case deflection and customer self-service allowing agents more time to support customers with complicated requests.