So you’re ready to implement Salesforce Knowledge. Congratulations! By this point, I’m sure you already know what Knowledge is, so I’ll save you the spiel. But, before you begin implementing Knowledge, it’s important to consider some preliminary questions. The following questions are by no means an exhaustive list, but should get you thinking about some pertinent decisions you’ll have to make before and during your Knowledge implementation.

What’s the Purpose of Your Knowledge Implementation?

The first step in planning an implementation is understanding what you want to get out of it. This may sound obvious, but many implementations fail because of this simple oversight. Do you want enable self-service for your customers and reduce the volume of cases in your call center? Are you looking for an internal portal for your new employees to get the information they need quickly? These leading questions will help you determine the types of articles you plan to publish in your knowledge base. 

Pro Tip: Whatever you decide, remember that Salesforce Knowledge is mostly intended for responsive documents — a user has a question and can pull up an article in the knowledge base for an answer. This is not the place to upload detailed 25 MB PowerPoint presentations; you can embed links to these within the article, which should be kept much more brief.

Does Your Organization Need to Target Particular Audiences with Certain Types of Articles?

If subsets of your organizational knowledge are only intended for specific groups or audiences, you should use Data categories to ensure that the right groups get the right information easily. Data categories are a set of criteria organized into a hierarchy of groups and serve two purposes: (1) organizing your content and (2) controlling access to it.

Articles are categorized according to the groups that you define (for example, segmenting your articles by product line or region). Sit down and plan how to break out your data categories, since this will be important down the line.

Pro Tip: You cannot break out your data category hierarchy more than three levels down. After you’ve defined data categories and assigned them to articles, users will be able to search and find the articles they need much more easily. 

Make sure that you have a clear idea of the types of articles your organization needs, as well as how users will interact with those article types. This will not only help you better plan and segment your Knowledge implementation, but will also determine the permissions and actions you need to assign to your various users (think: profiles and permission sets).

What Kinds of Reports and Metrics Will Your Organization Need to Access about Support Articles?

With Salesforce Knowledge, you are able to regularly maintain and improve support articles by running detailed reports. You can create custom article reports, or, better yet, download and install the Knowledge Base Dashboards and Reports app from the AppExchange. With these tools, you can view article usage, ratings, and search statistics broken down by channel or role to assess which articles should stay and which can go. You can also create and store external-facing reports, but keep in mind that only Partner Community licenses can access them.

How Much Control Does Your Organization Need over the Article Lifecycle?

Do your Knowledge articles change over time? If so, how frequently? You will have to work on putting a process in place to create, edit, and publish articles. Maybe you want to empower your support team to create and publish articles that solve customer issues, but you’re worried about giving them too much freedom in the publishing process. Salesforce Knowledge provides flexible solutions for managing your organization’s articles. You can appoint article managers and create an approval process specific for publishing articles. You can set up an approval process for specific article types that require legal or management review prior to publication, or have certain article types automatically route to specific product teams and specialists to add relevant technical content.

Does Your Organization Leverage Multiple Channels for Support?

If you want to share your support articles with more than just internal support teams, Salesforce Knowledge is an excellent option. You can share your articles through four different channels, in addition to your own website. Internal users can access articles directly in Salesforce, while Customer and Partner users can access articles via Customer and Partner Communities, respectively. Finally, your articles can also be made available to the general public with a Public Knowledge Base by leveraging the Public Knowledge Base for Salesforce Knowledge app from the AppExchange.

Salesforce Knowledge is a powerful tool for creating and managing helpful content for your users. Build it, keep it simple, and watch it eliminate headaches for both your customers and your support agents. Some other questions to keep in mind include: How much storage space do I need? Do I need articles in multiple languages? Am I leveraging a Community? Do your research; it would be a shame to purchase feature licenses and set up an implementation, only to find that the system doesn’t allow you to do what you need. 

Measure your service organization against case and knowledge best practices; take the 10-question Customer Service Quiz now.

This blog’s content is based on a book I wrote, Salesforce Service Cloud For Dummies.