View source for Creating Pega Knowledge articles and leveraging in Customer Service

{{Design pattern|Title=Creating Pega Knowledge articles and leveraging in Customer Service|Description=Simplify how information and answers are presented to their agents/CSRs|Version=8.4|Applications=Pega Customer Service|Capability Area=Knowledge Management|Owner=Scott Kennedy}}

= Summary =
Virtually all organizations are looking for ways to simplify how information and answers are presented to their agents/CSRs while reducing the amount of time searching for information during interactions or back-office research.  Empowering customers through knowledge in unassisted channels such as web self-service sites remains a key strategy for businesses as they look for ways to deflect calls or other interactions from the contact center. Giving customers the information and answers they need to ‘self-serve’ helps with this strategy. Configuring and publishing Pega Knowledge Help Sites (self-service knowledge sites) is a best practice for addressing external customer knowledge needs.

A common best practice in contact centers is to minimize the amount of searching your agents must do to find relevant information and answers while working with customers during an interaction (regardless of interaction channel, for example, phone, chat, messaging). Proactively suggesting contextual articles in service cases can effectively reduce and often eliminate searching for these answers, since the articles will be suggested along with related service cases in Pega Customer Service.

= Article standards =
Establishing article standards for your knowledge management organization is key to ensuring article consistency across your authoring team as they create or edit content. Formatting standards also helps ensure consistent readability, which helps with overall article quality and usage across the enterprise.

Pega Knowledge provides the ability to create content templates that your knowledge authors can use to ensure consistent formatting of articles where needed (or example, FAQs and How-to articles) . Once you have created and published content templates, KM authors have the option to select a template within the rich text editor. Another more restrictive option allows knowledge managers to enforce a single content template that is used for creating all articles. This can be useful when a single article format is required and should be used by all KM authors.

It is recommended to use the '''Article references''' capability when creating articles to provide links to other relevant articles within an article for the end user.  This also helps to minimize the need for users to search for related information or other articles and helps keep the user focused on helping the customer during an interaction. 

== Article title ==
* Article titles should be brief and descriptive of the content. 
* Longer title descriptions are unnecessary and should be handled in the Article abstract. 

== Article abstract ==
* Provide a brief summary of the article that would help an end user (customer or CSR) understand the premise of the article.  
* At a minimum, copy a meaningful sentence from the article body that provides a good description or summary.  
* The abstract is displayed to end users when hovering over the article title in the Customer Service Interaction portal and KM help sites (‘tiles’ layout option).   

== Article content/body ==
The primary goal of knowledge articles is to provide CSRs (or customers) with concise, easy-to-read and understand information or answers to common customer questions. It is a best practice to keep these articles within a page or two in length, or the minimal required length to convey the main information for the article. Creating multi-page (dozens or more pages) articles can be counterproductive, forcing the agent to take time reading and article and hunting for the right information to help them with a customer’s inquiry.  -''Less is more''.

Recommended* font sizes:
* Section headers: font size of 16 (or 18) and bold, Open Sans.

* Content body text: font size 16, Open Sans
'''*'''Businesses should determine their desired or optimal font size and type, based on their contact center requirements for article readability and corporate standards. 

== Images and videos ==
Images can enhance an article '''''when''''' they are contextual and add visual clarity about an article, but should not be over-used to avoid visual clutter.  If using images:
* Ensure they are sufficient resolution to render with good clarity and no pixilation. Pega Knowledge supports the following file types: jpeg, gif, png.  
* Super-high resolution images are not required and can have a negative impact on screen refresh performance 
* Images do not need to be more than 1MB in articles to achieve a consumer-grade quality while maintaining performance.  This is a general guideline only.
Video embed tags are supported in the Source mode of the rich text editor.  This allows immediate display (and preview or still) of video service providers like YouTube™, Vimeo™, and DailyMotion™.  Support for native or binary file videos such as mp4, avi, and so on are not yet supported directly through the rich text editor (Pega Knowledge feature roadmap).  However, you can attach a video file as a file attachment or provide a link to the file through the rich text editor hyperlink feature.  Since video files can be very large, it is not recommended to attach large video files to articles, as they are stored in the KM database with the article and can effect performance when opening articles (same for any large file attachments, not just videos). 

== File attachments ==
Pega Knowledge allows KM authors to attach files to articles, such as brochures (for example, PDFs) or diagrams.  This can be helpful to end users when additional details or information is available and required, but is not appropriate to place in the main article body.  
* File attachments should be limited in use and should not be larger than 5MB.
* Limit the number of file attachments, since your end users will need to determine which attachments they should open when interacting with a customer. Having too many attachments can be distracting to end users. 

= Configuring articles with Customer Service cases =
The Pega Knowledge application is pre-integrated with Pega Customer Service, allowing simple configuration of contextual articles with service cases. It is a best practice to proactively suggest relevant knowledge articles with service cases so CSRs have relevant information and answers at their fingertips rather than having to always search for this information.

Customer Service users with the PegaCA:Manager role have access to the '''Configuration tools''' option in the '''Other actions''' menu while viewing Customer Service cases. From the Knowledge content tab, managers can search and select articles that they want suggested to CSRs when the corresponding service case is launched. Articles specified in the first screen of the case will be suggested for each stage or screen of the case, or different articles can be specified for each screen as the case advances.

Note that the number of suggested articles allowed can be controlled by the “Limit the number of suggested articles” configuration in App Studio:  '''App Studio > Settings > General > Knowledge management'''