Definition
Answers was a legacy Salesforce community feature (retired in the Spring '18 release along with Chatter Answers) that allowed users to post questions and receive answers from other community members or support agents. Users could vote on the best answers, and the question asker could mark one answer as the best answer, creating a searchable knowledge base of community-sourced solutions. The modern replacement for this functionality is Chatter Questions.
Real-World Example
At their company, a service operations lead at ShieldGuard Security leverages Answers to deliver consistent, high-quality support across all customer channels. Answers ensures that every inquiry follows the same process, agents have access to relevant customer history, and managers can track performance metrics in real time.
Why Answers Matters
Answers (and its sibling Chatter Answers) was a Salesforce Classic community feature that let customers post questions and receive answers from other users or support agents. Participants could vote on the best answers, and the asker could mark one as the accepted answer, turning the thread into a searchable knowledge asset for future visitors. It was part of the early self-service support playbook in Salesforce, before modern Experience Cloud and Knowledge took over that role.
Salesforce retired Answers and Chatter Answers in the Spring '18 release. Existing data from those features remained in orgs but new functionality was no longer available, and the modern replacement is Chatter Questions combined with Experience Cloud self-service features and Knowledge articles. Teams still running on legacy orgs sometimes encounter Answers data when auditing old communities, but no new deployments should use this feature.
How Organizations Use Answers
- •Oceanic Corp — Still has archived Answers data in an old community from before the Spring '18 retirement. The data is preserved for historical reference but no new questions can be posted, and the team plans to archive or delete it during an upcoming community modernization project.
- •ShieldGuard Security — Migrated off Answers years ago and now uses Chatter Questions within their Experience Cloud customer portal to capture questions that don't have a matching Knowledge article. New content flows from the best answers back into Knowledge.
- •Vandelay Industries — Documented their Answers feature usage during a Salesforce audit so that future admins understand why some old records still exist. The audit flagged that the data should eventually be exported and removed to reduce clutter.