Introduction Knowledge is an essential asset for competitive advantage and business sustainability. Effective knowledge sharing should ensure that vital knowledge is retained and used within an organization but requires action by the recipient. Adoption and maintenance of knowledge base play a key role in ensuring success.
Knowledge Adoption Approaches
- Three major motivating factors for Knowledge Adoption are as below
- Recipient’s self-motivation: This involves the recipient’s judgment of benefits and drawbacks in adopting knowledge. Monetary incentive, career advancement, reputation, perceived job security, and perceived job overload were identified as the proxies for this type.
- Environmental motivation: External influences on an individual’s intention to adopt knowledge. This may be set as an organizational norm.
- Sender-driven motivation: This represents the recipient’s internal encouragement from his/her perception of senders’ characteristics or their relationship with senders. It includes the sender’s expertise and the recipient’s personal relationship with the sender.
- Organizational success depends on the value of knowledge that an organization possesses and the ways in which the organization utilizes that knowledge.
- Improve quality of articles
- Categorize the articles so that adoption raises
- Find gaps and usefulness of articles through reports and dashboards and assign these to knowledge experts for improvement.
- Have a proper format for each article type.
- Ensure that articles are updated and are up to date with the product.
- Case management
- train agents on how to find and attach articles.
- Encourage agents to create a new article if none of the existing articles has details about the solution.
- Recognize and reward agents who are contributing to knowledge.
- Make the articles readable
- Consistent look and feel.
- Less number of sections with proper indentation.
- Relevant information
- Well organized.
- Motivate agents
- Use gamification to promote the desired behavior among support reps.
- Set up a leaderboard for most authored articles and highest average article scores.
- Recognize and reward agents based on the number of articles created and approved.
- Monetary incentive, Career advancement, Reputation, sender’s expertise are positively related to an individual’s intention to adopt new knowledge from another person.
- Perceived job overload is negatively related to an individual’s intention to adopt new knowledge from another person.
- Analyze usage
- Create reports and dashboards that show information related to the use of knowledge.
- See how many cases are being resolved without articles associated to them
- Improve accessibility
- Ensure knowledge is integrated with the console where agents spend most of their time. This can be achieved by enabling knowledge one widget.
- Exposing knowledge to Customers through Communities to enable self-service, to let customers know about the known issues.
- Knowledge suggestions
- encourage collaboration for creating and reviewing knowledge articles
- enable suggested articles in knowledge settings.
- Encourage customers to provide ideas. Validate these ideas and bring them to the roadmap.
- Improve quality of articles
Knowledge Maintenance Approach
- Optimize Search Results
- Salesforce search is powered by a search engine that brings users smart, relevant results automatically. Salesforce search uses Goldilocks porridge strategy (initially AND operator is used between search terms and based on number of results returned, OR operator is used)
- Search applies advanced features to Knowledge, such as spell correction and lemmatization
- With spell correction, users might see results that match a corrected spelling of the term. Say the user types Julai. Salesforce returns results for Julia because no records contain the word Julai. But, say a user types Julie. Salesforce returns the single record for Julie, but not records for Julia.
- Lemmatization identifies and returns variants of the search term. For example, a search for fry also returns results for frying and fried. With lemmatization, users get results even when they’re a little off on the exact phrasing.
- Search highlights and snippets help in showing matching terms in the context of an excerpt (aka a snippet), right on the search results page. To enable snippets with highlighting: From Knowledge Settings, check Highlight relevant article text within search results.
- If auto-complete is enabled, suggestions appear as users type their queries. It’s a quick way for users to find a record even before hitting the search results page. There are two flavors of auto-complete in Knowledge searches: for article or question titles and for keyword searches.
- Auto-complete for title searches presents users with the record they want and bypasses the search results page, saving valuable time. Search suggests up to three articles with titles matching the search term.
- Auto-complete for keyword searches helps users choose the right search terms when they don’t see the record that they want. A search suggests the three most popular keyword searches performed based on the search term and the channel’s Knowledge search activity. Out-of-order matching is supported. So, whether your users enter vanilla and chocolate swirl or chocolate and vanilla swirl, they get the right results.
- Improve Search Experience
- Add promoted Search Terms: If an article addresses a common support issue, you can associate keywords, called promoted terms, with it.
- If the user’s search matches the promoted terms, the associated article is returned as the first search result, with the rest ordered by relevance
- To create, edit, and delete promoted search terms, you need the “Manage Promoted Search Terms” permission
- You can only manage promoted terms for published articles.
- Here are a few things to know before you start creating promoted search terms.
- Be selective with promoted terms. Use them thoughtfully only when you want to be certain
- Article search matches a promoted term whenever all keywords within the term occur within the user’s search terms, in any sequence.
- Each keyword must match exactly. Each promoted term can have a maximum of 100 characters.
- Your organization can create a maximum of 2,000 promoted terms.
- The end user’s language setting determines the scope of the article search. Search results exclude text that’s not in the user’s language, including article versions and associated promoted terms.
- Create Synonym Groups: Synonym groups are words or phrases that are treated equally in searches. A search for one term in a synonym group returns results for all terms in the group.
- Customize Suggested Articles Based on Case Fields
- Create a Knowledge Search Activity Report.
- Use the Knowledge Search Activity Report to create synonym groups and to promote search terms.
- Use the Knowledge Search Activity Report to make improvements to existing articles.
- Add promoted Search Terms: If an article addresses a common support issue, you can associate keywords, called promoted terms, with it.
- Analyze and Enhance Articles
- Leverage Salesforce Reports engine to create reports and dashboards for
- most viewed articles,
- highest rates articles,
- articles attached to closed cases.
- Use the Knowledge Search Activity Report to
- create synonym groups,
- promote search terms.
- make improvements to existing articles.
- Assign article actions to users and ensure that they have access to the relevant article types and data categories.
- Leverage Salesforce Reports engine to create reports and dashboards for
- Implement Review Process: Leverage salesforce approval engine to enable the approval process for the relevant article types.
- Implement Feedback Process
- Encourage support reps and customers to rate articles
- Utilize chatter to allow internal users to exchange comments about articles.
- Existing Information database: Knowledge maintenance may also involve adding articles from an existing information database to Salesforce
- Create and import a zip file containing a csv file for article type, properties file, html files and images referenced in the html files.
- Continuous Improvement: Have a proper change management plan that addresses knowledge adoption and maintenance concerns
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