Use Parature knowledge for effective customer engagement

Knowledge management plays an important part in the customer service process, and access to accurate and up-to-date information can help your customer service agents reduce the average handle time to provide quick and right answers to your customers. Unified Service Desk enables you to use the rich knowledge base in Parature from within the agent desktop so that your customer service agents can quickly search for relevant knowledge in Parature while working on a case, and provide accurate answers to the customers, without having to switch applications. Parature is a cloud-based customer service solution that enables you to easily create and manage rich and accurate knowledge base that helps your customer service agents deliver the right answers to the customers at the right time. More information: Parature: Knowledge Management

Important

Before you can use knowledge from Parature within Unified Service Desk, you must have an instance of Parature, and must have enabled integration with the Parature knowledge management for your Microsoft Dynamics CRM instance. More information: TechNet: Connect Microsoft Dynamics CRM to Parature knowledge base

Unified Service Desk provides a new type of hosted control, KM Control, which can be used to configure a knowledge base article search pane in your agent desktop that lets you search for relevant knowledge stored in Parature, and then take next set of actions on the search results such as share it with the customers or associate it with case if the knowledge helped in resolving the case. All this can be done from within your agent desktop without having to switch applications. Unified Service Desk provides you with a sample application, Knowledge Management, which demonstrates the capabilities of the new feature. More information: TechNet: Sample Unified Service Desk applications

When you deploy the Knowledge Management sample application, and search for a case in Unified Service Desk, the new KM Control hosted control is automatically displayed in the right panel of the agent desktop application in a case session.

The actions and events exposed by the KM Control type of hosted control lets you configure a knowledge base search experience in the agent desktop that’s integrated with your Parature instance. More information: KM Control (Hosted Control)

Use the KM Control hosted control to:

• Search Parature knowledge base: Your service agents can search and view knowledge base articles in Parature from within the agent desktop. You can configure the knowledge base search control to automatically show search results based on the title of the currently opened case or based on any other criteria as soon as a session is created. The service agents can also manually search for knowledge bases by typing in the search phrase in the search box.

• Position your search control as required: You can configure where you want to display the knowledge base search control in your agent desktop: LeftPanel, MainPanel, or RightPanel as per your requirement. In the Knowledge Management sample application, the control is placed in RightPanel. For information about different types of panels, see Panels in Unified Service Desk.

• Contextual actions for the search results: You can configure the following actions in the search control when a knowledge base article is selected in the search results:

  • Copy the link or URL of the article. You can paste the article URL in the chat session with customers or in an email. You can only copy URLs for the Parature knowledge base articles that are not in the draft or expired state.

  • Send the knowledge base article link in an email.

  • Associate a knowledge base article with an incident (case) in CRM. Associating articles to cases helps in determining which articles were effective in resolving cases. You can also configure to dissociate a knowledge base article, which is already associated to a case, from the case, if it’s not helpful or is out-of-date.

  • Click a knowledge base article in the search panel to open it in a tab in the main panel with all the contextual actions available. Links within a knowledge base article can be accessed to navigate to the linked topic from within Unified Service Desk.

    

  • Pop out and pop in a knowledge base article from and back to the Unified Service Desk main panel. This feature is useful if you’re working on multiple monitors, and want to pop a knowledge base article out from the client and display it on another monitor while you continue to work with the customer on the Unified Service Desk client on the current monitor. After finishing your work, you can pop the article back in the main panel.

    

For information about how you can configure Parature knowledge management integration in Unified Service Desk, see Configure Parature knowledge base in Unified Service Desk and Walkthrough 8: Use Parature knowledge within your agent application.

See Also

Tasks

Walkthrough 8: Use Parature knowledge within your agent application

Concepts

Configure Parature knowledge base in Unified Service Desk
KM Control (Hosted Control)

Other Resources

Learn to use Unified Service Desk
TechNet: Sample Unified Service Desk applications
TechNet: Connect Microsoft Dynamics CRM to Parature knowledge base

Unified Service Desk
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