Search Optimization Using Products, Categories, and Dispositions

Customers can use products and categories to narrow their search results on the customer portal.

Because the search results are filtered on the customer portal through these classifications, the search finds answers and community entries that are more likely to resolve customers’ questions. Likewise, agents can search for incidents and answers based on products and categories when responding to incidents. They can also classify incidents and answers when they work on them by selecting products and categories, thereby increasing the organization of information within the knowledge base.

Note: For Knowledge Advanced customers, the lists of products and categories available to content authors depend on how items are configured in Knowledge Advanced.

Before you add products and categories, take some time to plan how you want use them to organize incidents and answers. For example, if you have many products that share a common set of support issues, you might want to add a top-level product name to group them instead of using individual product names. Or you might want to add subproduct levels to further filter the products. Top-level products and categories classify incidents and answers in broad groupings, but you can add five more levels of subproducts and subcategories to further refine classification.

When agents classify incidents according to their disposition, your knowledge base contains the information you need to understand how incidents have been closed. Additional levels of subdispositions let you further refine the classification of incidents.

The following procedures describe working with products, but the procedures to add and edit categories and dispositions are identical. Simply replace product information with category or disposition information where appropriate.