Contextual Help is a Web Widget feature that uses the web page your visitor is currently on, along with your Help Center content, to suggest Help Center articles that may be relevant to their questions. Its goal is to reduce the effort of an end-user who might be trying to self-serve by suggesting contextually relevant articles.
The example below shows how the Web Widget uses Contextual Help to populate the widget with relevant articles as the user browses to a web page about the REST API:
This article includes the following topics:
Enabling Contextual Help
Before you can enable Contextual Help, make sure you meet the following requirements:
- You have public Help Center content (not requiring log-in) or restricted Help Center content that you have configured to be accessed via the Web Widget.
- The Web Widget is installed on your website.
- You have enabled Help Center option in the Widget admin.
To enable Contextual Help
- Open the Web Widget Admin page by clicking the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar and selecting Channels > Widget. - Click the Customization tab.
- Make sure that Help Center is toggled on.
- Click the toggle to enable Contextual Help.
Understanding how Contextual Help works
The Contextual Help feature determines which articles should be suggested by looking at URL of the web page the end-user is on It then uses the part of the URL after the hostname (that is, the part after .com, .org, etc.) to perform a search on your Help Center to find relevant articles, and displays the first three resuts as Top suggestions.
For instance:
- If an end-user is viewing the page myshop.com/apps, the suggested articles will include the first three results of a Help Center search on the term "apps".
- If an end-user is viewing a page deeper in your website, for instance myshop.com/account/billing, the suggested articles will include the first three results of a Help Center search on the term "account billing".
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If no articles match the search term, just the search box is displayed in the widget.
Customizing Contextual Help results
If your URL paths are not likely to produce useful suggestions, or if you just want more control over the results, you can override the search by utilizing one of our SetHelpSuggestions API methods.
For information on customizing your results, visit our Web Widget Developer Documentation.
Comments
6 comments
Does contextual help search tags too, or just words in the actual article?
Chat lives on pages like this
https://live.taketheinterview.com/my_interview?code=3dcd3646deb02fbddd58dad1e1fd4969#login
How can we get related articles to populate? Right now it is wrong.
@robert Contextual Help uses the same search as your Help Center Knowledge Base. I've created a ticket for your question so we can look into your specifics with you.
We're seeking to embed the contextual help into our online app. We'd like to filter the results by the article's label and then by a language search within that label.
Is that possible with the Widget API? (If not... I'd like to offer that kind of two-tiered filter as a suggestion!)
Scott, the Web Widget automatically keys to the browser language so I expect that it would display articles of that language that use the label included in zE.setHelpCenterSuggestions. Is that not what you are finding?
I am having the same issue as mentioned here https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/218033707/comments/226504588 . When navigating between pages in an SPA, previous 'Top suggestions' stay in the widget until a later suggestion is found. This is a major problem for an SPA with many routes - I can't guarantee that all of them will find their own top suggestions, and if the old suggestions stay in the widget then that is simply confusing for end users.
Is there any plan to either automatically clear the top suggestions when calling setHelpCenterSuggestions , or to offer a 'resetSuggestions' function? I'd really like to avoid having to roll our own widget using the apis!
Hey Sybil -
Welcome to the Zendesk Community!
I've taken a look at the ticket that was created for Dave, and it seems that in his case it was an issue within the way his app was coded. Because it's such a one-off problem, I'm going to go ahead and create a ticket for you so that our support team can do the appropriate troubleshooting for you. Look for an email from me shortly.
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