Insert Article Into Email in SF Lightning KB: Send Public URL Instead of the Entire Article

What happens when one of your support agents working on a customer case notices that a solution is already available in Lightning Knowledge? What options does he/she have to share the solution with your customers?

In 2018, the fastest method is to use an out-of-the-box function, namely ‘Insert Article into Email’. Launched in the Spring ‘18 release, this Lightning Knowledge function allows support agents to insert an article into the body of an email. Although quick and useful, the feature has certain limitations.  

• The most important one is readability, or the lack thereof. Because this function retrieves an article and pastes its text into the email body, formatting can be distorted to the point of illegibility.
• The second limitation concerns the length of the article. Several email clients ignore the files exceeding a certain size. A long article cut at a random place and can cause an inferior customer experience. Concerns over size also put a severe limit on how many articles can be shared in an email.

Our client did not want to be stuck with either scenario. We suggested the following solution.

Instead of pasting an article in its entirety into the body of an email, share the public URL of that article because sharing a URL takes up less space in the body of an email and, if a case demands, multiple URLs can be shared. After a few hours of coding, the updated function was up and live. Right now, the client’s support agents are more efficient and customers are receiving more helpful, detailed, and readable emails. Following is how it looks without and with customized ‘Insert Article into Email’ functionality:

In summary, the benefits are:

• Increased readability. A URL does not distort customer experience as much as the body of a long article.
• Improved customer experience. Instead of an article pasted right into the body of an email, there is only a link which the users can click to read the article in a separate window.
• Quick knowledge sharing. Your employees can share links to Knowledge articles as quickly as the entire articles.

Following is how the functionality works now:

The limitation of the solution is that only the articles with a public URL can be shared, so this short solution is more useful in support-customer interactions than in intra-company communication.

Want to know more about Salesforce solutions and services we offer? Check out here…