What is the difference between "Social Q&A" and "Communities"?

Isaac Vicentini · ‎11-16-2020

Hi!

I read in the documentation on these two topics, but I couldn't identify the main differences between them.
Could you please exemplify me? When should I use one or the other?

Thanks!

Best regards,

Isaac Vicentini
MVP 2025 ✨

If my answer was helpful, mark it as Helpful or Accept as Solution.

tsutherland · ‎11-16-2020

From the Paris documentation, Social Q&A is being deprecated.

The Social Q&A feature is being deprecated. You can instead use Communities to connect, engage, collaborate, with employees, customers, partners, and prospects. As an existing customer upgrading to the Paris release, you can continue to use Social Q&A (if enabled) or migrate your existing social Q&A data to Communities. For more information, see Migrate Social Q&A data to Communities.

So in that regard, you may not want to start using Social Q&A.

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Travis Rogers · ‎08-13-2021

Community could be leveraged much in the same way. For example, a Knowledge Feedback Task could be generated via business rule when any community question is set to "Solved". The content team could check the question and the resolution, then verify if the KB has that level of detail.

The issue I've personally witnessed with Social Q&A is users often aren't providing feedback on an article. They're on an article, it isn't helpful, and they use the comment field to report their incident. I have seen entire lists of comments from people like "My Outlook is still frozen and this wasn't helpful. Please help!" and such. Obviously, with no immediate monitoring of the Q&A, this issue report goes nowhere.

Actionable Knowledge Feedback directly on the KB articles addresses true article feedback as well.

Chris D · ‎08-17-2021

You're not wrong about Communities being able to be used to effectively replace SQA functionality - and obviously that's the thought behind deprecating SQA - but, without sounding like a broken record, my concern is more just the added overhead/complexity to achieve the same thing. Not that Communities are that complex - and not that they can't provide functionality above and beyond SQA - but it's just more.

I think what I'm lamenting isn't necessarily a gap left by SQA/Communities but rather a gap that (I think) exists either way: how do you know what you don't know?

From the Virtual Agent side, there's some recent (semi-)automated topic recommendation features coming out of Incident record analysis which somewhat addresses that.

But I'm imagining - both from VA and regular Portal/Knowledge searches - it'd be nice if there was a way for the system to see what people were searching and determine what articles might be missing in a similar fashion to topic recommendation.

As far as your second point, I can definitely feel you there - and completely agreed that Actionable Knowledge Feedback was a real gamechanger in turning Knowledge comments from shouts to the void into real feedback, which is what they are. And even if it is a true incident, at least somebody will be responsible for getting them some help or direction.