Pega Communities provides an ability for your customers, partners, and employees to explore and discuss solutions to common questions and issues. Community members can leverage the expertise of their peers and your business experts to openly collaborate and find answers in a safe, moderated forum.

Using Pega Customer Service, customer service representatives can view a summary of the most recent community posts by a customer, view all of the customer's posts, and open a full discussion thread to see an entire conversation for full context. Customer service representatives can reply to a post which is automatically marked as Best Answer or can mark an existing reply as Best Answer if a participating member has already provided the correct answer.

This section contains the following topics:

• Creating and managing a community site
• Navigating a community site
• Starting a new discussion
• Best answers capability
• Searching in the Community

You can create, configure, and publish a community site from the Community page in the Knowledge portal. Pega Knowledge supports the creation and deployment of a single community site. A sample site is provided for reference only.

Published tab

Displays the published community site, and the sample (site provided with the installation), displaying the community title, author name, last updated date, and status. When you select a community site, you are directed to the community configuration page. You can update the configuration setting and styles and click Publish to publish the changes.

Click Save Draft to save your changes in draft. This helps you to review the site and publish later.

Draft tab

Displays the draft community sites details, and status. When you select a community site, you are directed to the community configuration page. After updating the configuration settings, click Publish to publish the community site or click Save Draft to save the community site as a draft.

The community site provides navigation that allows users to explore discussions by category, view recent posts and replies, view topics that are trending in the community, and quickly view their own posts and replies.

Community members can reply to posts to provide solutions and answers to common questions. The creator of a post can mark a reply as Best Answer, allowing other members with the same question to find that answer. Replies marked as Best Answer are automatically routed to a Pega Knowledge workbasket as knowledge content candidates, If approved and promoted to a Pega Knowledge content, community best answers can be another source for providing valued content leveraged by both internal and external users.

Categories

On the Categories tab, you can see the categories that are available in the community site. Select a category to view relevant questions and solutions. You can also comment, reply, and follow the posts.

Recent

In the Recent tab, you can see the most recent posts and replies.

Trending

In the Trending tab, you can see the most active posts in the community.

My discussion

In the My discussion tab, you can see the list of the discussions that you started and the discussions that you follow.

Badges

Pega Communities provides an awards and badging capability to encourage active participation among members. Members earn badges based on reaching thresholds for number of replies, best answers, use of tags, and a variety of other criteria. In the Badges tab, you can see the badges that you have earned, details about the other badges that you can be awarded, and the criteria that are required to earn them.

Start a discussion

Click this option to start a discussion and enter your question. For more information about starting a new discussion, see Starting a new discussion, later in this section.

Recent badges

Displays the recent badges received by community members.

Follow

Members can follow the community posts and discussions to track. You can see all the followed posts and discussions in My discussion tab.

Send emails to new replies

Members can now optionally receive email notifications when a post receives a new reply or comment. The notification option is post-specific and the member can easily opt-out of receiving email notifications.

Popular tags

Displays the commonly used tags in the community. Click a tag to search for relevant articles or discussions.

More like this

Members can now see the community post links and articles based on the tags associated with the existing community post.

Member name drop-down

Members can edit their profile by selecting the Profile option from the member name drop-down in the header of the community site. Members can change their community account password by selecting the Change password button, and can edit their user name and any personal or professional skills they want to be associated with their community account using the Edit button.

Members can start a new discussion when they are looking for an answer or information that is not already available in the forum.

1. On the community site, click Start a discussion.
2. Enter the topic title.
3. From the Category list, select a category that you believe best classifies your question or topic.
4. Enter the description of the question or topic. You can apply styles, upload images, and provides hyperlinks to external websites.
5. Enter a tag name or select from the available tags to help other members more effectively search for your question or topic. You can specify multiple tags to a topic.
6. To save your changes and make your discussion public, click Post.

Pega Communities allows a member to mark a reply as the Best Answer for their question or post. Only the owning member of the post or a moderator can mark a reply as Best Answer. Replies marked as best answer by a moderator are flagged as Moderator Best Answer, to differentiate them from a member's best answer flag.

The Mark as Best Answer option is enabled if you have started a discussion on the community site. You can select the Best Answer based on the discussions and replies. When a reply is marked as Best Answer, a copy of the post is placed below the original question, allowing other members to quickly see the Best Answer in the discussion thread.

When a community post or reply is marked as Best Answer, note the following:

• The application automatically creates a draft knowledge article with the post's original question and the best answer, and routes it to the Knowledge Management > Workbaskets > Knowledge Content - Content Candidates.
• An author can open the content candidate and determine if it qualifies as a published article, and click Approve to save the draft content. Once approved, the content moves through the standard Pega Knowledge content approval process prior to publication.
• Optional: Click Actions > Reject Content Candidate to delete the draft content.

Community members who are following a discussion receives a notified by email that a Best Answer has been provided. The member can click on the provided link to view the discussion and the Best Answer.

Community members can search for answers when they are in the discussion view by entering search terms in the search bar located in the banner image area or the tab area. Pega Communities use a combined search result display which shows both relevant community posts and knowledge articles. This allows the member to find answers quicker, regardless of whether they are in the form of a post or a knowledge article.

Depending on which site the user is in (for example, Community or Knowledge help site), clicking on an article or post search result navigates the user to the native site to read the full article or discussion.