Feature Request: Add a notification banner to Help Center

This would be a very welcome edition - agree that it should be built in without needing to custom code or purchase another product/design service.

Hi All, thank you for the feedback!

While we don't have this in our plans at the moment, this may change so I would like to understand the requirements a bit better. I would love to hear a few things about the requirements in your current use cases (not things you may need in the future):

1. To what extent will you need to customize the look and feel of the notification? (E.g, background color and text color, size, include images etc.)
2. What are the parameters that you need to be able to target the banner on? (E.g. user's location, help center locale etc.)
3. How many languages do you need to be able to support?
4. What are real examples of notifications that you have displayed/wanted to display? (Text, links and/or a screenshot if possible)
   4.a.  Does the notification always link to a Guide article?
5. How would you like the banner to be activated? (E.g. Labels on articles and/or it's own dedicated interface etc.)

Please post your answer to the above questions if you have a concrete need for this feature and add anything else you think is relevant :) 

Thanks!

Hi Gorka, thanks for your post! Here's my thoughts on what would work best for our business:

1. Background colour, text colour/font etc for sure and the ability to add an image or icon would be helpful to distinguish different 'types' of alerts e.g. is there an issue or just some fun news we want to highlight.
2. On the Help Centre homepage at minimum, but on all Help Centre pages would work too!
3. N/A for us
4. It would be good if we could have specific text in the banner link to an article, section or category, so not a requirement for it to specifically always link to an article.
5. I think it's own interface is more easily managed, as it's hard to ensure the label you use isn't in use as a label elsewhere.

Hi Gorka, great to see some attention here - this would be an excellent feature to have brought forward.

1. To what extent will you need to customize the look and feel of the notification? 
   Background colour, text colour, font, icon (with the ability to upload our own or to choose from a pre-selected number or use an emoji) and URL appearance.
2. What are the parameters that you need to be able to target the banner on?
   Across all pages on the Help Centre, with the ability for an end-user to close the alert on the page they are currently viewing.
3. How many languages do you need to be able to support?
   N / A currently, but it would be best if this could pull from the language of the Help Centre, that the user is currently viewing.
   
   
4. What are real examples of notifications that you have displayed/wanted to display? (Text, links and/or a screenshot if possible)
   A banner could reflect a number of things - an announcement (new software available), notices (about upcoming maintenance on services) and errors (issues with software). 
   

   Intercom offer banners for their Knowledge Base - https://www.intercom.com/help/en/articles/4557393-how-to-create-a-banner-message

   Equally two Zendesk partners (LotusThemes and ZenPlates) offer Alerts in their custom themes, which showcase some examples on the types of information that would be useful to display:
   https://www.lotusthemes.com/products/alert-extension
   https://www.zenplates.co/documentation/customization/adding-a-notification-banner

   4.a.  Does the notification always link to a Guide article?
   No - not strictly. I believe having the option to include a URL to a Help Centre article or having the ability to click the banner and go to an article would be useful. However, I think it could be beneficial to link to other sites (such as Developer Portals, Status Pages, etc.).
   
   
5. How would you like the banner to be activated?
   Ideally, it's own interface - from here you could style the banner as you need it, create reusable templates for banners and most importantly schedule banners to display during certain periods.
   
   The reason I would prefer an interface is that we could restrict access to certain incident leads or knowledge base admins for deploying / scheduling a banner during required periods.

On top of the above, I think a banner tool should have the following:

• API access to enable / disable the banner -  for automating incident notifications (incident occurs in our incident alerting tool, we fire an alert to Zendesk to display the banner on our Help Centre).
• The ability to collect feedback or info from a user (email address) - for example, have the ability to ask users how they feel about your new banner (click the happy / sad face for how you feel).
• Reporting!!! Views, clicks, feedback submitted, etc.

Into the world of nice to haves:

• Having the ability to add a piece of JS to a website, similar to the Zendesk Messaging Widget where you could deploy a banner would be amazing. From the interface, deploy a banner to multiple sites (perhaps with a toggle if you only want the banner to display in the Help Centre or all websites with the banner code).
• Rules for viewing the banner on the Help Centre - for example, the banner only displays to customers with a certain tag or customers belong to an organisation with a certain tag (Enterprise Organisations).

Really exciting to see this considered! :)

1. To what extent will you need to customize the look and feel of the notification?
   Color Backend, Color Font, Size, an icon on beginning like Warning, Attention, Info...
2. What are the parameters that you need to be able to target the banner on?
   Info Text Subject Line, Link Button like "We are offline" - Button Text "Check Now" -> forward to Article or Webtarget
3. How many languages do you need to be able to support?
   Dynamic Content should be enough :)
4. What are real examples of notifications that you have displayed/wanted to display?
   "Our Next Technical Meeting Talk is at "Date" Click here to "REGISTER" as button (forward to Webinar Registration Page or "We have a temporary issue, check out this article for debug" -> Click Article Link
   4.a.  Does the notification always link to a Guide article?
   Of course not.
5. How would you like the banner to be activated? (E.g. Labels on articles and/or it's own dedicated interface etc.)
   The best would be to have it separated and configurable in GUIDE settings.

Kind Regards,

Tobias

A notification banner in both the Help Center and the Agent Workspace would be really beneficial to push notifications to agents. It would be great if there was a way to do this without the coding as that is more time consuming, especially if you are updating the notifications regularly. 

+1 for this feature