Fabrikam Knowledge Sprawl Across Four Languages
Fabrikam maintains about 3,000 knowledge articles across four languages, written by product teams and maintained by only 12 part-time reviewers. Two article templates exist, but many articles ignore both.
About 40% of articles have not been reviewed in 18 months. Agents often cannot find the right article and paste steps from Word documents into case notes instead. Last quarter a customer on the external portal found an internal troubleshooting note describing a known security defect. Fabrikam also has near-duplicate articles in each language, with no indication which version is current, and reviewers are unsure whether editing an article in place is safe.
1. Design an article lifecycle and versioning approach that prevents unreviewed or internal content from reaching the external portal.
Read the worked answer
Use the built-in lifecycle rather than a status field of your own: Draft → Review/Approved → Published → Expired. Only published articles should be visible on the portal, and visibility must also be internal-only for troubleshooting notes.
Versioning rules:
- Major versions for content changes customers or agents rely on; publishing a major version makes it the current one.
- Minor versions for typo and formatting fixes that do not need re-approval, keeping the audit trail clean without flooding reviewers.
- Keep the prior major version available so a bad edit can be rolled back rather than re-typed.
Enforce structure with templates. Templates standardise sections (symptoms, cause, resolution) and make review faster, which matters when only 12 reviewers serve 3,000 articles.
Set expiration and review dates on each article and report on overdue reviews, otherwise the 18-month backlog simply recurs. Before publishing, explicitly set the article's visibility to internal or external and test one article end to end on the portal, because visibility is the control that failed last quarter.
2. Agents cannot find articles and paste from Word instead. What would you change in search configuration and agent workflow, and what would you check first?
Read the worked answer
Check the content before tuning search. If titles are generic, keywords empty, and descriptions missing, search cannot return good results regardless of configuration. Fix title, keywords, description and product association on the top 100 articles by case volume and re-measure.
Then improve the agent workflow:
- Put the knowledge search control on the case form and in the session template so search is where the agent already is.
- Enable article suggestions from the case so the agent sees candidates based on case title and product.
- Make linking an article to a case part of the resolution expectation, and report on cases resolved with versus without a linked article.
- Use article feedback so agents can flag bad content, creating a review queue rather than silent Word documents.
Then tune search: confirm relevance search is enabled, check that articles are in the correct state to appear in agent search, and confirm language and product filters are not excluding results. Measure success by the share of cases with a linked article and by search-to-link rate, not by search click counts.
3. Fabrikam needs the same article in four languages. Compare the available approaches and recommend one, including how to keep versions aligned.
Read the worked answer
Recommend the built-in translation feature over hand-written copies. Translating an article creates a linked copy with its own language, so the relationship between the source and its translations is preserved and reviewers can move between them.
Why not independent copies: four unlinked articles drift immediately. A change to the source has no traceable counterpart in the other three, nobody knows which is current, and expiry dates diverge - exactly the near-duplicate problem Fabrikam already has.
Keep versions aligned:
- Treat one article as the source of truth and translate from it after each major version.
- Review and publish each language independently, because a translation may be ready later than the source.
- Set the same expiration and review dates across the family and report on families where one language is stale.
- Confirm portal language routing shows the right translation rather than the source language.
Accept that translation is a manual review step; the tooling creates the link, but a native speaker still has to approve each language version.