Vote With Your Thumbs for Even Better Salesforce Docs

Ever wonder what happens when you click thumbs-up or thumbs-down on a Salesforce doc? Or what happens when you leave a comment? Do they go into a black hole? Does anyone ever look at them?

Banish the thought, dear admins and devs! Your feedback and clicks don’t disappear into the ether. Salesforce’s Doc Team, consisting of 100+ professional writers with about a thousand years of combined experience, regularly review and revise the help content based on your feedback.

Click the thumbs up or thumbs down buttons to comment on help docs

Click the +/- button to comment on developer docs

Let’s talk about the key metrics and data we use to decide how to revise the docs: topic ratings, customer comments, and page views. Also, we’ll share some tips on how you can help improve the docs so that they’re more informative and helpful for admins and devs like yourself.

Love, Hate, and Docs: Customer Ratings

Customer ratings are based on the number of thumbs up and down votes that a doc has received. Obviously, we love to see lots of thumbs-up!

But sometimes that’s not the case. When we evaluate how our docs are performing, we look at the ratio of thumbs-up to thumbs-down. A “stinker” is a poorly rated doc that received a higher number of thumbs-down compared to thumbs-up, taking into account the total number of votes. So if a doc has 10 votes, and 3 are thumbs-up and 7 are thumbs-down, we consider it to a stinker because it only has a 30% positive rating. When we get low ratings, we think about it in context with page views and customer comments to decide how to improve the topic.

Whether you love a doc or hate it, vote with your thumbs!

Page Views: To View or Not to View, That Is the Question

Page views count the number of times readers have viewed a doc during a particular period of time. Interpreting page views is more art than science. A doc can have high page views because it appears highly in search results, so more people look at it. Or a doc can have high page views because it describes a popular feature that Salesforce users are interested in. Low page views could be because a doc isn’t appearing in the first page of search engine results, or because it’s a new doc and hasn’t had much time to gain traffic.

We have a few options for addressing docs with low page views. We can try to optimize the content for search so that the doc comes up higher in Google and Help & Training search results. If the doc was added recently, we might decide to give it more time and see how the page views compare after another release. On the other hand, we might decide to delete the doc if it seems redundant or irrelevant.

Customer Feedback: Tell Us What to Doc Better

After you vote with your thumb on a doc, you have the opportunity to comment. We love your feedback and read each and every one of your comments! Even comments in other languages—we’re fortunate to have a multilingual staff here at Salesforce, so we seek out someone to translate them for us.

The best comments tell us what we can do to improve the doc. The more specific, the better! For example, comments like “How do I print a case comment,” “Pictures please,” and “Needs an example” tell the writer exactly what you’re looking for.

Specific suggestions help us improve the docs so they’re more useful to you.

Sometimes we get comments that don’t give us enough information to act on. For example, I recently got the comment “information bad” (seriously!) on a topic. I know one of you out there didn’t like the doc, but I have no idea why. And that means, I have no idea how I can improve it.

Often customer feedback includes feature suggestions or comments about how to improve the Salesforce functionality itself. Salesforce product management loves to hear what customers really want. The best way to make feature suggestions is on the IdeaExchange, where you can post your ideas and fellow admins can vote on what they like best.

As writers, we strive to provide the best information experience for you. We welcome your feedback to help us continually improve the Salesforce docs.