Definition
Chatter Answers is a Salesforce feature that combines Chatter, Answers, and Salesforce Knowledge into a self-service community where customers can post questions, receive answers from other customers or agents, search Knowledge articles, and vote on the most helpful responses. It provides a branded Q&A portal that can be embedded in Experience Cloud sites.
Real-World Example
At their company, a customer success manager at CloudNine Solutions leverages Chatter Answers to streamline support operations and reduce the backlog of unresolved customer issues. With Chatter Answers in place, the team routes cases to the best-qualified agents, tracks SLA compliance automatically, and provides self-service options that deflect 30% of incoming volume.
Why Chatter Answers Matters
Chatter Answers was a Salesforce feature that combined Chatter, Answers, and Salesforce Knowledge into a self-service community Q&A platform. Customers could post questions, search Knowledge articles for answers, vote on the most helpful responses, and have their questions converted to Cases when they couldn't be resolved by the community. The feature was offered as an embeddable widget that could be added to Experience Cloud sites, providing a branded customer-facing Q&A experience.
Chatter Answers was retired in the Spring '18 release along with the underlying Answers feature. Salesforce's modern recommendation is to use Chatter Questions within Experience Cloud sites, combined with Salesforce Knowledge for searchable articles. The modern stack provides similar self-service capabilities (community Q&A, Knowledge article search, escalation to Cases) with better integration into the rest of the platform and ongoing Salesforce investment. Orgs still encountering Chatter Answers data are typically maintaining legacy implementations and should plan migrations.
How Organizations Use Chatter Answers
- •CloudNine Solutions — Migrated their Chatter Answers community to Experience Cloud with Chatter Questions during the lead-up to Spring '18 retirement. The migration preserved the categorization scheme but required rebuilding the customer-facing UI.
- •Oceanic Corp — Maintains archived Chatter Answers data in an old community for historical reference. The active customer-facing community has long since moved to Experience Cloud with modern Q&A features.
- •ShieldGuard Security — Documented every legacy Chatter Answers configuration during their modernization audit so the migration team could replicate functionality in Experience Cloud without missing requirements.