Guide to Optimizing Salesforce Knowledge Management

According to a 2019 report by The Northridge Group, 68% of customers experience delays while waiting in line to talk to agents. 57% of the time, they have to repeat themselves. These lead to a negative customer experience, but Salesforce knowledge management helps you avoid this.

Image showing how knowledge management systems influence a better customer service and employee experience.

So, what is knowledge management? This uses effective knowledge management resources to help resolve internal and external issues through informational articles. It effectively shares insights across digital platforms with minimal intermediaries to ensure quick access to information and a short sales cycle

According to the Salesforce report, implementing proper solution management can increase your revenue by up to 37%.

The Increasing Importance of Implementing Knowledge Management

Thanks to the digital revolution, businesses are transitioning from local to global scale operations. Although such changes are necessary, they have also brought along data management challenges, including a larger client base, client journeys, and larger-scale production down to little things, like different languages and cultures to be aware of to meet customer’s expectations. 

The amount of information companies need to process is also becoming overwhelming. Implementing a knowledge-based system helps companies to organize and classify information. It also allows the system to recognize relations between data points and trigger necessary responses. By categorizing information into a single framework, data also becomes easier to access and interpret. 

Transitioning from the traditional knowledge management to the modern Salesforce cloud system is more of a process than an event. With the many strategies available, evaluate the effectiveness of the different strategies, and research the current state of your knowledge management system before the implementation process.

Table comparing traditional knowledge management system to a modern knowledge management system.

Evaluating The Effectiveness of Your Salesforce Knowledge Management Strategy 

A suitable implementation strategy is that which reflects your organization’s business processes. For example, if you are satisfied with the current practices of managing services and marketing but your CRM doesn’t fully support them, your implementation strategy would differ if you required changes in any service process. In this situation, you will need to adopt an approach that will only help digitize the processes with attention to the uniqueness of your business.   

If you need to change the service processes, your first step would be to redefine your processes and technology from scratch. This is the most complex strategy but beneficial if provided with strategy alignment consultations from a reliable firm. 

Implementing A Strategy That Reflects Your Business Needs

The first step would be to analyze the current state of your organization and determine:

  • The kind of content that you already have.
  • What type of documents need to be updated.
  • How difficult will it be to produce the type of materials you need?

Next, do research on your competitors about their knowledge base developments and what their clients are asking.

In your content building process, you can adopt either of two approaches:

Internal Data Analysis

Here, you will have to get on the ground and interview your customer support team on the common questions from customers and their fellow team members. You can do this by having physical meetings or calls depending on their working locations, whether remote or onsite. Alternatively, you can collect the desired information through questionnaires or online surveys to give them the freedom of expression. 

Review the submitted information and tickets to determine what your clients struggle with most.  For instance, it can delay shipment. Such a query can be eased off the customer service team with a simple article clarifying the expected shipment duration from the time of payment plus any variables. 

One of the significant benefits of a knowledge management system is the association of specific articles within the account. It helps save time by working with prebuilt templates that you can use to link to necessary articles. Moreover, you can also develop a workflow rule that will allow your clients to receive an automatic email once a support member defines the case type. 

External Research   

Taking this approach exposes you to a broader perspective of the type of questions customers in your line of business are asking on global platforms like Quora and social media. It exposes you to unique issues that you can leverage on your business as they allow you to know your customers better.

As the last option, you can peek into your competitor’s strategy. Browse through their website and see how they have structured their knowledge management system. Think of what you can adopt from them. For better insights, you can go an extra step and analyze search queries related to them on google. Analyzing search queries will give you deeper insights into what your target consumers are most interested in and help you create a buyer persona that will enhance engagements.

Salesforce Best Practices

Optimizing your Salesforce management allows you to get the most out of your investment. Some tips to maximize Salesforce service cloud amenities include:

  • Defining article types – Clearly defining your article helps information reach the right target audience through optimized searches. You can also go a step further and define the target audience through experience levels and job profiles.
  • Allowing for edits and updates – Updates ensure your articles are fresh and reflect the issues in the current environment. Using Salesforce knowledge, you can update content online and offline, providing the flexibility of planned and unplanned updates. 

Managing permissions – Through Salesforce knowledge permissions, you can define who has rights of access to the system. While all internal users automatically get “Read” permission by default, you assign specific employees the rights to write content, manage and delete articles.

Contact us for more information on how you can manage your content better and achieve your ROI goals.

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