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
- 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 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.
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.
50 Comments
Thanks for sharing the link to your post Annie :)
Super appreciate you taking the time to share this with us!
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?
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.
@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
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
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?
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.
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
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.
Thank you Jacob! this helps.
Why is one of the requirements for Contextual Help having a Help Center that does not require log-in? Do we have a similar option if we require our customers to log in?
Hello Denielle Barcelona,
I just did some testing in my test account to be sure, and I was able to enable contextual help while also having sign in required for my help center. So, technically it is possible. That being said, having the help center locked handicaps the features of contextual help. If you have your Web Widget on a public website, it will only be able to offer public articles (that are not hidden behind a login) to your visitors. So if your content is all private, contextual help will have nothing it is able to offer.
I expect it might be possible to have all private content (nothing that is Visible to Everyone) and then use some sort of authentication custom code trick or SSO system to make everyone visiting your website count as logged in. Maybe using this: Enabling authenticated visitors in the integrated Web Widget. But I can't say for sure how that would work.
I hope that helps!
I was looking for more information around the ability to modify number of top suggestions but it seems the article has been archived?
Do we have any more information on this please?
Hi,
Some of our sub-pages are on the format subpage.homepage.com rather than homepage.com/subpage.
How can we get the contextual help to use the subpage for the suggestion with this format?
Hello Johan Reiler
Unfortunately the system does only read the info after the .com, .org, etc, so contextual help may not be the best option for your work.
You could use contextual help with a bit of help from the API if you want. With this article, How do I make top articles automatically show when a visitor opens the Web Widget?, you can learn how to add in a bit of code on each page to tell the system what terms to use in the search and pull results into the widget. So, instead of reading the URL for search terms, it is reading your predesignated search terms from the code.
Another option would be to scrap contextual help all together and instead use filtered searches to pare down and focus what content your visitors see when they search. This doesn't give them a pre-selected list of three articles, it will still just be an empty search box. But when they do search, it will limit the options that can be pulled from to a specific subset of articles. If you're looking to focus what your visitors see on different parts of your website this is a great alternative option. Learn more about that here: Can I limit search results in the Web Widget?
I'm sorry there's not a better solution to get contextual help to read the pre .com words. But I hope these alternatives are helpful and useful to your use case!
Hi, we have a locale mismatch in our suggestion center. Widget is not able to shown top 3 articles because locale( EN-US)( capitalization problem i think) is different that the widget ask in the url .
Example:
widgets asks for this :
...?locale=en-US&per_page=3&label_names=COVID-19%2C24-HOURS%2CFAQS-GENERAL
and not results shown, but if i put this in browser URL
...?locale=EN-US&per_page=3&label_names=COVID-19%2C24-HOURS%2CFAQS-GENERAL
or even this
...?locale=en&per_page=3&label_names=COVID-19%2C24-HOURS%2CFAQS-GENERAL
Widget show results.
How can i fix this ? because this is critical for us.
Thanks in advance.
Hey Ignacio,
It looks like you have a ticket open with our Customer Care team regarding this issue. We will continue working with you in your ticket to dig into this further.
Let us know if you have any other questions in the meantime!
Is there an easy way to have the help widget I designed show up as my contextual help widget? Right now I have a custom widget on my help center(https://help.safariportal.app/hc/en-us). But the black standard widget shows up on my website when I install the widget code.
This is the widget code I installed:
Above i read this question:
"Does contextual help search tags too, or just words in the actual article?"
Answer: "Erica Wass: @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. "
but now i have just added a label 'course' to an article, but in the widget that article does not show up as an suggested article on a page with url .../course...
When we search in the Help Center the article dóes show up when searched for 'course'
plz help
Hi Hkluppel!
Since Contextual Help relies on the URL of the page that the end user is on and then combines it with Help Center Search, article labels would be included, but you may not see expected results if the URL does not include relevant terms after the hostname.
As the article mentions, you can use the SetHelpSuggestions API method of zE.setHelpCenterSuggestions({labels: ['label1']}); to pull in specific labels.
If you continue to have trouble, please let me know and we can start a ticket to get specific examples from your account!
Best,
Matt - Customer Advocate
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