Answer Management

Many of the maintenance tasks related to organizing the answers in your knowledge base are automated in Service. This allows you to focus on improving and maintaining the content of answers.

This list outlines these automated processes and describes the tools designed to aid with answer management.

• Aging of answers (Solved Count)—Just as frequently used answers will rise to the top of the knowledge base, lesser-used answers will move to the bottom through aging of the answers solved count. See Solved Count Aging.
• Answer review and publish feature—By using the Review feature, you can easily monitor answers without needing to constantly review them. The Review feature will automatically set an answer to the Review status when the solved count reaches zero or on specifically defined dates. You can also manually set a review date, the date that you want the answer to go into review status. In addition, you can set a publish date for a date in the future. In this way, you can schedule an answer to become public automatically without having to publish. See Answer Review.
• Data mining—The processes of linking similar answers for the Related Answers feature is triggered automatically and occurs periodically when modifications are made to the knowledge base. These processes implement innovative technologies to cluster and link answers containing similar content.
• Customer feedback—Service closes the loop by providing customers with a method to submit comments and suggestions on answers. Any feedback submitted through the question, “Is this answer helpful,” is turned into a Feedback for Answer incident accessible to agents. You can use this feedback to address content holes and improve answers.
• Customer visit tracking—Service tracks customer actions as they move through your support site, recording where they went, what they searched for, and the answers they viewed. Using the Web Visit feature, agents can view this click-stream data to respond more appropriately to customer questions. This information can also indicate areas of the knowledge base that need to be tuned. See View Web Visit Information for an Incident.
• Knowledge base reports—A series of standard reports record how customers are navigating the knowledge base, including the products and categories they are searching on, the search text they are entering, and the answers they are viewing. These reports provide a unique and powerful perspective into how the knowledge base is performing, and enable you to pinpoint weak areas and tune the knowledge base content. See Answer Evaluation Using Analytics.