Mike HeapMike is an experienced Product Manager who focuses on all the “non-development” areas of My AskAI, from finance and customer success to product design, copywriting, testing and more.
Alex RaineyAlex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
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Jul 18, 2024 04:05 AM
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Jul 18, 2024
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salesforce-knowledgebase-integration
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Salesforce is a powerhouse CRM, but is its built-in knowledge base hindering your support team’s efficiency? This post explores how Salesforce knowledge base integrations can empower your agents.
We'll discuss common problems with Salesforce Knowledge, the best alternative knowledge base platforms, and the benefits of connecting them to your CRM.
What Is a Salesforce Knowledge Base Integration?
If you already have an established knowledge base hosted on a platform other than Salesforce and you want to make it accessible directly in the CRM tool, using a Salesforce knowledge base integration will be of importance to you.
Instead of importing your articles and support documents from platform to platform, these integrations connect your external knowledge base to your Salesforce setup. The documents are then directly accessible within Salesforce.
With the right setup, you can also let customers find answers themselves through a customer portal or AI chatbot that integrates with the knowledge base.
Why Use a Salesforce Knowledge Base Integration
Despite being one of the most renowned CRM platforms, Salesforce has its fair share of disadvantages. In particular, Salesforce Knowledge, the knowledge base system built into the CRM tool, might be lacking in the following areas:
- Importing features: Some users have reported that their articles were imported with all formatting cleared. Additionally, photos require manual re-insertion after importation.
- Indexing: Salesforce Knowledge typically indexes only 100-250 characters. In other words, searches only look for matches in titles and keywords.
- Usability: Salesforce Knowledge can feel clunky and unintuitive due to outdated user interfaces. As such, building and navigating the knowledge base can be cumbersome for both your agents and content creators.
- Limitations: Actions like removing a published article while editing it are not available on the platform. Also, you are unable to insert knowledge articles into macros.
Sticking to Salesforce Knowledge can still be a good decision if you’re looking for an all-in-one solution. However, for a wiser approach, using an external knowledge base system and connecting it to Salesforce using integrations and connectors might be better.
Best Salesforce Knowledge Base Integration Tools
Here are the top knowledge base systems that have existing integrations—both official and third-party—with Salesforce. Most of them can be found in Salesforce AppExchange.
Document360
Document360 is a knowledge management platform that allows you to develop and publish a knowledge base, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and other types of documentation. Here’s what makes it a suitable alternative to Salesforce Knowledge:
- Direct access: Support agents and other users in your organization can access the documents and knowledge articles you host on Document360 within Salesforce.
- Link sharing: Your agents can directly share the link to your Document360 articles with your customers.
- Article creation within Salesforce: You can also create new articles that will be saved in Document360 without leaving Salesforce.
Spekit
If you’re looking for a tool that specifically boosts the efficiency of your support agents, Spekit might be the right choice. It offers a knowledge-based solution that focuses on providing in-context information support instead of solely relying on a central repository. Here’s why Spekit excels:
- Contextual access: Spekit allows you to embed knowledge base articles, called Speks, directly into Salesforce. This eliminates the need for users to switch between applications to find the information they need
- Content gap analytics: The tool also offers analytics to track user engagement with your knowledge base content. You can see what information is being viewed and searched for, identify valuable content and knowledge gaps, and even gauge user feedback.
Bloomfire
Bloomfire is a knowledge management software platform that acts like a central hub where employees can collaborate, ask questions, and access important information. It uses AI to make searching and finding information easier. It even helps teams create content and become more self-sufficient. You might want to use it for the following reasons:
- Deep indexing: Unlike Salesforce Knowledge, Bloomfire indexes articles and knowledge posts more deeply. Instead of only looking for matching titles and descriptions, it scans entire documents for a more accurate search result.\
- Content linking: Your support agents can tag and link the content that helped them resolve a Salesforce case, serving as a recommendation or reference for similar cases in the future.
- Analytics: As your agents link content to Salesforce cases, the analytics feature of Bloomfire lets you see which content seems most helpful and which needs improvement.
Confluence
If you want to prioritize the easier creation of knowledge-base articles, Confluence, which is known for its collaborative editing features, can be a powerful knowledge base connected to Salesforce through third-party integrations. Here are some reasons why it’d be great to use:
- Centralized authoring: You can create and edit knowledge-base articles in the Confluence interface, which also lets you access team collaboration features. Then, using a connector, publish them to Salesforce Knowledge.
- Bulk publishing: Depending on the third-party connector you use, you can publish posts in bulk by publishing your Confluence space with selected pages.
Note that multiple integrations and connectors are available to connect Confluence and Salesforce. You can check them out in the Atlassian Marketplace.
Conclusion
While Salesforce Knowledge can be limiting, it’s not all that bad if you want to focus on one platform. However, for the wiser person, opting for a more solid knowledge base integration is much better. This way, you can bridge the platform’s limitations.
After creating your knowledge base and integrating it into your Salesforce workflow, you can take things a step further. In particular, you can leverage an AI-powered chatbot to make the knowledge base a lot more accessible, not only to your agents but also to your customers.
Here’s how the idea goes:
- You connect your knowledge base as a training resource for the chatbot.
- Once trained, your AI chatbot can accurately retrieve information from your knowledge base despite the complicated grammar and queries of your users.
In this regard, you can start efficiently time-wise and money-wise with My AskAI.
Written by
Written by
Alex Rainey
Alex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
