What are Salesforce Chatter Answers
Salesforce Chatter Answers refers to a self service and support community where users are able to post questions and get answers on these questions from other users and support agents. Users post questions and comments and receive feedback from other salesforce users with the support agents also providing technical views and support. This feature helps bring together Cases, Salesforce knowledge articles, questions and answers in a unified platform and manner. Implementing Data Categories is necessary before the administrator can set up Chatter Answers. Where Salesforce knowledge articles are required to appear on one’s zone, the administrator must implement the Salesforce knowledge.Nature of the Product This Salesforce feature, unlike other features in the Salesforce package, is spread over numerous areas of set up. This implies that there is no single location in Salesforce where you can update and configure all the settings that are related to the Chatter Answers. The set ups and updates are done from several locations depending on what the user requires. For example, updating the Customer portal settings is done by clicking Customize followed by Customers Portal and finally Settings. On the other hand, when one wants to update the Force.com settings, it is done by clicking Develop followed by Sites.
Setting up of the Product Setting up of this feature in Salesforce requires several customization and maintenance actions on various components. It involve customizing cases, case assignment rules, workflow rules, Apex triggers on questions, Visualforce pages and Customer portal users. Apart from these, it also entails maintaining feature licenses and organization-wide sharing default. Customizing the appearance of the Chatter Answer zone on a company’s branding requires updating visual pages and also adding them to the Force.com site that is normally used to host the zone.
Importance of the Product Everyone wants to make work easier and more fun. Customers, the employees or business partners, cannot resist procedures for making work more fun. Making online engagement and interactions between customers, clients, partners and employees makes a company more interesting and rewarding. This, at the end pays huge dividends in revenue as well as customer retention. Chatter Answers is a perfect platform that facilitates peer to peer support and help. The feature has a lot of great reputation and capabilities within it. This is therefore of great benefit to an organization. The good news also is that Charter Answers product is available for free for these people or businesses that are Service Cloud customers. Therefore they don’t have to incur extra costs to obtain this fantastic Salesforce Product.
Managing Data and Functions Available to Users This product integrates several features with the Customer Portal. This therefore means that managing it is similar to managing Customer Portals. Several features can be used to manage data and functions that are accessible to the Charter Answers users. They include:
- Profile, permissions and Access settings. They are used to find out user’s permission to carry out a given function like adding comments to a given case.
- User license can be used to define the profile and sets of permissions that are available to a given user. Some of the licenses that can be used to manage the information available to a user are High Volume Customer Portal and the Customer Portal Manager Custom license.
- Feature licenses can also be used to entitle a user to additional Salesforce features like Charter Answers.
- Field level security defines which field a particular user can access. It helps in managing information and content. Field level security can be used to give access to Salesforce knowledge articles for example.
- Sharing sets can also be used to selectively grant record access to defined groups of high volume portal users.
Chatter Answers users can only access given set of records from a zone. These include Cases, Questions, replies or answers and Salesforce Knowledge articles.
Language Used This product is designed to only support a single user language for each zone that is created. When the feature is enabled, the Visualforce pages that are automatically added to the organization’s platform inherit the organization’s default language. The users that later carry out self registration for that given zone also inherit the default language of the organization, This is same with the guest users who no matter the language chosen by their browsers, can only view the zone in the language specified in the Visualforce pages. Features of Chatter Answers and How They Are Used in a Business A lot of the features that are built in the product make it useful to a business .In order to appreciate the importance and benefits of this product, it is necessary to have a look at its great features and how they work and help an organization or business.
Points One of the great capabilities of this feature is the tracking of all community activities such as questions, answers, likes and follows. Tracking is done on these activities to facilitate the awards of point values for each of the activities. One can then keep them as they are or go further and weigh them differently to meet the needs of the community. In cases where one needs to use custom weighing, it is necessary to turn off the standard hover picture. This important data can be used in building a custom leader board or invites to a given private group and reward them for their participation and involvement.
Leveling Up This is another important feature of Charter Answers. It lets the user define custom ranks for community members based on points. The importance of the ranking is that it makes new members easily identify experts It also enable the users feel that they are making some progress as they do their posting. It is however recommended by experts to keep the ranks low with ten being the maximum. This is then coupled with the provision of perks at each rank as a way of rewarding engagement and keeping users motivated.
Multiple Communities The product allows for use of separate communities for two different products or services. Each community will have its own set of article and questions. The customers are then able to get access to the separate communities and have uniquely named ranks in the communities.
Conclusion Salesforce Chatter Answerer is a great collaboration tool that can be used within and across Salesforce instances. It helps build a team internally and move content and information quickly. It is therefore a tool that can be used to increase efficiency in an organization or business.