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About Contextual Help for the Web Widget

Aimee Spanier
  • Edited
Zendesk Documentation Team

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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).
  • The Web Widget is installed on your website.
  • You have enabled Help Center option in the widget admin.

To enable Contextual Help

  1. Open the Web Widget Admin page by clicking the Admin icon () in the sidebar and selecting Channels > Widget.
  2. Click the Customization tab.
  3. Make sure that Help Center is toggled on.
  4. 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 results as Top suggestions. Community posts are not included in the suggested articles list.

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".

  • If no articles match the search term, just the search box is displayed in the widget.

Note: Contextual Help is disabled for the Web Widget inside of Help Center because any suggestions would return the article the user is currently viewing. You can manually set suggestions using the Zendesk API, see Customizing Contextual Help results (below).

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.

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40 Comments

  • Brett - Community Manager
    Zendesk Community Team

    Thanks for sharing the link to your post Annie :)

    Super appreciate you taking the time to share this with us!

    1
  • Mark Bridges

    For a URL with # in it, does everything after the # get ignored?

    For example: 

    https://www.mysitename.org/app#/profile/address

    would the search be based on 'address' or is everything after the # ignored?  

    0
  • Nicole S. - Community Manager
    Zendesk Community Team

    Hi Mark -

    We haven't been able to test to confirm, but the consensus amongst our support agents is that they would expect everything after the # to be ignored.

    0
  • Mark Bridges

    @Nicole - is there a place where I can submit a feature request?  For single page web applications such as ours, ignoring the # in the URL would allow our support team to be more flexible.

    Thanks,

    Mark

    0
  • Nicole S. - Community Manager
    Zendesk Community Team

    Hey Mark -

    Yep! You can post your request in the Support Product Feedback topic in the community.

    Here's our guide on How to write an effective feedback post

    0
  • Becca Chapman

    We would like to offer dynamic/contextual help center article suggestions for our not-public (requires login) help center. Will the SetHelpSuggestions API methods work in this scenario? If not, is there a way to set a static list of suggested Help Center articles based on the page of our website the user is on?

    1
  • Devan - Community Manager
    Zendesk Community Team

    Hello Becca,

    This should work on the help center after the user is logged in, or if they authenticate using JWT on an external site. I've included a couple of articles that should help explain this in further detail. 

    Enabling authenticated visitors in the integrated Web Widget

    Enabling authenticated visitors in the Chat widget

    Using restricted Help Center content with the Web Widget

    Best regards.

    0
  • Merav B

    Hi,

    Is there a way for me to see a report on how many users are using specifically the web widget (as opposed to browsing/searching in the help center itself) to read articles in my help center, and how many and which articles are being viewed there? 

    thank you

    Merav

     

    0
  • Jacob J Christensen - Cloudhuset A/S
    Community Moderator

    Hi Merav,

    In the Reporting section of Zendesk Support, you should be able to see details about user engagement with your help center content, including searches. You will also be able to filter for the channel, like the web widget, to better understand the user journey.

    In time, hopefully, these capabilities will be included in the Explore datasets also.

    1
  • Merav B

    Thank you Jacob! this helps.

    1

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