Comments on Knowledge Articles - Best Practice?

[Laurie12]

I'm looking at turning on the Comments field at the bottom of the knowledge article.  For the last five years I've had them turned off and only use the Helpful button and Flag Article, which is working well. I publish work practices, procedures and policies in my knowledge base and all updates/changes go through an approval process. I'm concerned about having open Comments on the articles that may mislead people or cause confusion. If someone makes an incorrect comment about a procedure/policy and others act on it, there may be risk. I'm also worried about the maintenance of comments. Does anyone have any experience with Comments working well on articles or would you recommend staying with the feedback process? If you use Comments, do you have any rules around how you monitor and maintain them? Looking forward to your comments!

[Sam_Kerr2882246]

Hi @Laurie12 ,

We have comments turned on but also created a supporting commenting guidelines article; eg No inappropriate language or spam as well as making sure the information commented is actually relevant to the article in question.

We have a pretty basic reporting widget that tracks new comments, that we make a conscious effort to check each week, this also lets us take on suggestions for enhancements to the article in question. (Eventually plan to have some flows put in place for 'Unanswered' comments)

It can be a lot of work to maintain the comments on high traffic articles, so also suggest having a SME or a group be responsible for the responses to their articles.

And finally we enforce that the content on the article is the process UNTIL a knowledge contributor uplifts the article with the suggested updates mentioned by a comment.

We originally didn't have this and it was confusion chaos. Once it was established it was adopted almost immediately.

Hope the above is of help!

Cheers,

Sam

[Laurie12]

Thank you! Can you tell me how many knowledge articles you manage? Also, are you using the feedback process as well?

[Sam_Kerr2882246]

Currently have around 2000 articles and growing daily.

We are not fully mature yet in the feedback process, at the moment any Not Helpful or Rating 2 or less will create a Feedback Task based on the feedback from the customer. All of these Feedback Tasks currently go to our Knowledge Management team but we will be switching over to the articles SME/Group to action once use cases have been mapped to support the Feedback form.

[Eoghan Sinnott]

We are currently in the process of disabling comments on our articles, and move exclusively to the Flag option, and using KFTs. We have many knowledge bases, with the main ones being our internal help desk (6000+ articles) and then our internal "self service" (4000+).
Currently our dedicated knowledge management team monitor the comments daily and then use a system of tags or labels to track the progress of the comments; if they need actioning, following up on, escalation etc. 

This is one of the reasons we are moving away from comments, it is a very manual process to keep on top of. It can lead to a duplication of work, as you are unable to assign these comments,

The other is as you mentioned, concerns around incorrect information being posted to comments, and then other end users following these processes which haven't been verified. It can also end up turning into an ungoverned message board, with people commenting and then replying to others, with full conversations happening within your knowledge article.

Deleting comments isn't a great practice as it will then remove them from any stats / usage reports that you may use as part of any reporting or KPIs.

We also received feedback from some of our agents that they were reluctant to leave comments on articles because they were "public" and visible to others, and felt that it could may be intimidating to question a process that was put in place by others. 

I hope this helps, and let me know if you have any further questions.