- [Instructor] A knowledge article is documentation
that answers questions or provides instructions
for solving common issues that internal
or external customers might experience.
Good examples of a knowledge article
is a step-by-step guide that explains what customers
need to do when an item they purchased arrived damaged
or answers to HR questions that an employee might have.
For example, how many vacation days they receive annually.
Knowledge articles are usually written by employees
of the customer service organization,
after which a knowledge manager will review
and approve or reject the article.
Once an article is approved, it then becomes available
to the customer service team.
The collection of knowledge articles
is called a knowledge base, and the knowledge base is used
by the customer service team to resolve cases
in Dynamics 365 quicker.
Keep in mind that knowledge management
will need to be enabled and configured before agents
can start using this functionality in Dynamics 365.
Knowledge articles are created in a Dynamics 365
customer service hub app.
Dynamics 365 comes with an out-of-the-box,
pre-configured knowledge process, but organizations have
the option to configure their own processes as well.
The default process for knowledge articles is as follows.
A customer service rep creates an article,
at which point the status of the article is in draft.
When the article is finished,
the customer service rep marks the article for review.
Then a manager reviews the article,
after which there can be two different outcomes.
The article either gets rejected, after which it can go back
to the CSR for updates.
Or the article gets approved,
after which it can get published, which makes the article
available for other customer service reps.
Let's see what this looks like
in Dynamics 365 customer service.
You can find knowledge articles if you scroll down
a little bit here.
And you can see that under the knowledge section,
we have knowledge articles.
We also have knowledge search and knowledge personalization.
When I click on knowledge search, that will take me
to a view showing me all of my active articles.
Obviously, if I want to see all articles,
I can just change my view,
and now I'm reviewing all articles in the database.
You can see the different statuses from here as well.
I can see several of my articles have been published.
I have two in draft, one is expired,
and one of my articles has been approved
but not published as of yet.
Let's open up my incorrect product information
knowledge article that's currently still in draft.
So what you can do here is enter a title,
you can enter a description,
and you can put in some keywords as well.
Now if I scroll down a little bit,
this is where your designer is located.
So what I can do from here is if I click here
on this full screen icon, this kind of pops it out.
And now what I can do is I can start to write my article.
You can see I have a lot of tools here.
I can put some links in here, I can put images in here,
I can put videos in here, et cetera.
I can also preview my article, right?
Whether or not this looks good on a desktop,
on a tablet, on a mobile device, et cetera.
And I can even review the HTML code as well
and start working on that, if that's your preference.
You can also click on the summary tab,
and this is really showing you some basic settings.
Whether or not this is an internal article,
what the status reason is, et cetera.
What's the language, what is the version, et cetera,
all that information is going to be available
directly from the summary tab.
I also have some analytics.
We can see how many people viewed this article
once it gets published.
We can get feedback for articles as well, and we can review
how many cases are actually using this article.
So again, giving us a lot of data and analytics
directly from that knowledge article.
The other thing I wanted to show you is that
we actually have the ability to attach files so that
when we're accessing or tying this article to a case,
people will be able to also take a look
at those attachments that we have here.
You'll also notice the business process flow
sitting on top of the form.
And just like we could do with the business process flow
on the cases, here we can also move the stage
to the right side of the screen.
You can see there are some different things
I need to populate here.
Let's say you were going to set this as a subject.
This is going to be a service subject.
Who's going to be the primary author?
That's actually going to be me.
And now I need to mark it for review.
This can then be picked up by a manager.
They're reviewing it.
They're going to say, okay, this is approved.
Do you want to approve the version of the article?
Yes, I do.
And as you can see, my next step
is now to publish my article.
You can set an expiration date, but it is not required.
And once we're done with that, I can click on finish
and again publish my article as the last step.
Let's go back to the list of knowledge articles.
And as you can see, my article has been published
and now is available to the entire organization.
Just remember knowledge management
includes creating, managing, and utilizing the knowledge
of a customer service department.