The long wait is finally over. The Salesforce Summer ’20 feature releases and updates are now implemented! To give you insights on how those new features work, we will be featuring the recent updates related to Reports and Dashboards in this blog series.

Do you think one of your upvoted ideas made the cut? Here’s an overview of some of the Summer ’20 report update features:

Reports and Dashboard Part 1: Filter Knowledge Reports by Category

In this release, you can now filter knowledge reports by category. See this new feature in action in this sample user case:

Rock & Roll Co. is one of the leading providers of Customer Support and Services in the shipping line industry. Thanks to the comprehensive public knowledge base implemented by its Salesforce team, the customers and agents of the company can efficiently get the information they need to solve cases using articles!

To improve customer support, the System Administrator thought of providing each of the company’s Regional Support Directors with a visual summary of the Top 3 Articles with the most number of cases. This way, the Support Directors will know what areas they should prioritize for their next knowledge base and service enhancements.

To do this, the admin created first a new Knowledge report type:

And since Rock & Roll Co. is currently operating in the APAC (Asia Pacific) and US (North and South America) regions, with services categorized in four types (Bulk, General, Special, and Passenger), the admin preferred creating a separate report for each region:

With the Knowledge report all in place, the admin then added appropriate report filters to return the accurate number of records using a brand-new feature called ‘Category Filter’. This allows using four different operators to get the desired Knowledge articles:

Along with this, the necessary knowledge article should be fetched by region. The admin did this by creating two separate reports for the APAC and US. This becomes doable because of a Category Filter added to each report, refining the results and displaying only the required data. The two filters are defined similarly, except for the value of the Region:

Aside from the ‘Region’ category, the admin can also include the ‘Services’ category to filter the returned records. This can contain all the services or just the main ones offered per Region. Now, there are two reports that return the ‘Case Association Count’ of the published articles for the closed cases. With the help of a Category Filter, analyzing the data from Knowledge articles became easier:

However, this new feature is only available on report types that include the Knowledge object, such as Knowledge Articles or Knowledge with Cases.

And to seal things up, the admin added the chart and table components in the Service Executive Dashboard. This is to visualize the data gathered, giving the Support Directors a more convenient view and access of the report.

And that’s how you filter knowledge reports by category. By doing so, you can visually present data to help you and your colleagues harness it for your next business decision. This is just one of the cool new features of Reports and Dashboards.

Can’t wait to see the other updates? Stay tuned to this series as we’re going to feature that on our next blog installment!