Contextual Help is a Web Widget (Classic) 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 required by an end user who may be trying to self-serve by suggesting contextually relevant articles.
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 (one that does not require sign-in).
- Web Widget (Classic) is installed on your website.
- You have enabled the help center option in the widget admin.
To enable Contextual Help
- In Admin Center, click the Channels icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Classic > Web 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 (Classic) Developer Documentation.
17 Comments
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:
<script id="ze-snippet" src="https://static.zdassets.com/ekr/snippet.js?key=774d3285-1aed-4335-bbef-76c1e15031da"> </script>
<!-- End of safariportal Zendesk Widget script -->
<!-- Start of safariportal Zendesk Widget script --><script id="ze-snippet" src="https://static.zdassets.com/ekr/snippet.js?key=774d3285-1aed-4335-bbef-76c1e15031da"> </script>
<!-- End of safariportal Zendesk Widget script -->
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
Zendesk offers free, on-demand training for all of our products. Set up your account and start learning today at training.zendesk.com
Can you confirm that Contextual Help *does* search in the article 'labels' for matches?
We have a URL as follows:
....fitchlearning.com/portaldemovirtual/learn/mycourses
I have some articles that all have a label = mycourses
However, these articles are not showing up in the top 3 suggestions on the widget. The widget is empty.
Do we need *ALL* of the URL strings to be added as labels for the articles to show up?
Or should i get results in the widget when I only have one of the strings from the URL as a label in the articles?
Thanks,
Fergus
The link to documentation on how to customize which articles are shown goes to a 404 page. Can someone please provide information on how to customize them?
@...
You've got a sharp eye! We launched a new documentation site today and not every link redirected correctly. This should now be fixed and no longer give you a 404 :)
Chris
Is it possible to specific a specific article to show up in the web widget top suggestions by default?
Hey Kevin,
This is possible by using the SetHelpSuggestions API in the web widget code. See this documentation for reference.
Is it possible to show more than the top 3 articles?
+1 to the suggestion from eVestment Education, I would also love to have more than 3 articles recommended as soon as the user opens the widget. Our widget is Help Center articles only.
I am looking for the same.. to have more than 3 articles to be shown..
Also instead targeting article via key search maybe an additional option base by category would be amazing
I'm trying to understand how it determines the articles shown in the Web Widget (Classic). For example website "(site)/appliances/*******/configuration/discovery" the article named 'Discovery Tab" with the label of 'Discovery' only does not show up in the web widget. Instead some totally unrelated articles show up, but the web widget works on other pages just fine by showing the article for the page.
Our URL structure includes account IDs and user IDs (EG domain.com/account/#/user/#/PAGE). How do I get it to ignore the words "account" and "user" and only start searching with the actual page name? Because it searches the whole URL structure, the results are not relevant.
Contextual Help entirely depends the relevant words included in the URL. If it's not giving the right articles, you might consider adding a labe to the specific article "Discovery Tab" that is related to the actual URL. If the same issue persisted, contact our support directly and we'll investigate further.
Hi Stephanie,
There's no direct way to ignore words in a URL. What I can think of is you can utilize help center suggestions for such pages in order for you to specify what articles to show. More information can be found in helpCenter:setSuggestions.
Will this be available in the Messaging widget too soon?
Why is the helpCenter:setSuggestions restricted to 3 results? If the user types the same phrase into the search they get a full list of results so why limit to 3?
I created a ticket on your behalf and will send it to you via email so we can discuss your concern.
Thank you!
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