Define a Process for Publishing and Reviewing Answers

Before you develop your knowledge base, you must have a process for publishing answers.

This process outlines the steps for efficiently capturing incident information and creating answers.

1. Define a process for proposing new answers—Typically, to publish an incident as an answer, the incident threads will need to be summarized to cover a broader topic scope. To take advantage of agent expertise, we have found this approach to be successful.
   1. An agent modifies the existing incident and writes the new answer as a Note thread with the public audience in mind, following established standards and guidelines. Two key items to include are the incident reference number and the staff member’s name.
   2. An agent proposes the incident. An answer is created, and the summary and threads from the existing incident are copied to the Question field of the new answer.
   3. You review, edit, and format the proposed answer, and then publish it. This method uses an agent’s knowledge for writing the bulk of the answer, and then you prepare the answer for public viewing.
2. Define an approval review process for new answers >—After an answer has been proposed for public use, you may want managers or staff members from other areas in your organization to review the information to ensure technical accuracy of the methods and procedures defined in the solution.
3. Determine the audience of new answers—Before publishing an answer, determine which interfaces and customers you want to be able to view the answer. You can control this visibility through the visibility of answer statuses, answer access levels, languages, products, categories, and conditional sections. See How to Control Answer Visibility.
4. Determine the display position of new answers—You can set the position of a new answer relative to other answers on the Answers page on the customer portal. When adding or editing an answer, you can choose to place new answers at the top, middle, or bottom of the answers list, or fix them at the top, middle, or bottom. If you want to give added visibility to newly published answers, place them at the top and then allow their historical usefulness to dictate their future placement. In this way, your customers are aware of new answers as you publish them.
5. Notify staff of new answers—Your administrator can use standard reports to show answer notifications by answer, product, category, or subscribers. Standard reports for answer notifications can be scheduled to be sent to other staff members and are found under Public Reports/Service/Site Reports/Answer Notifications. See How You Distribute Reports and Dashboards.

What to do next

After following these steps to identify your process for publishing answers to your customers and notifying staff members about new answers, you can begin creating answers.