Support Federated Search at Instant Search (= include them at Suggestions)
Feature Request Summary:
In a Zendesk Help Center the content of a federated search should be available within suggestions / instant search, because else our customers don't find content from this source.
Description/Use Cases:
We are a software company with around 100 products.
The user manuals for these product are stored in a external Webhelps (based on Help&Manual) seperately.
Each of these Webhelps has between 25 to 5000 pages.
For many reason these user manuals shouldn't be migrated/moved into the Help Center - we want to use the federated search capability instead.
We managed to sync some content to the federated search API sucessfully, but our internal and external UAT provided the feedback, that 95% of our customers and partner to not find the content because they use the search form on the Help Center (based on the standard theme Copenhagen) to search for content only.
If a content is not part of the suggestions the content is like not available to them.
Means external content via federated search API reaches only a small number of customers.
Currently the content of a federated search is only available, if a user executes the search by enter - as mentioned above nearly no customers to this, because they just have a look at the top suggestions.
It is also not easily to explain why a search by enter has content available, which is excluded for suggestions.
Business impact of limitation or missing feature:
If we don't manage to provide the content of our user manuals to our customers:
- the efficiency of our support platform is much lower
- support agents need to point out our customers to the correct chapter in the user manuals manually and this leads to higher costs/incident
- self-service capabilities of Zendesk as single source of truth maybe questions by our management.
-
Gorka Cardona-Lauridsen can we get an official response to this request? I can not find any documentation on federated search supporting or not supporting Autocomplete. Autocomplete is a major component of self-service and ticket deflection. Clarity on Federated Search functionality would be very helpful to your customers with multiple sources and content types.
-
Hi Josef Prandstetter and The Original DKNY, apologies for the late response.
Federated search is not currently supported in instant search (autocomplete) and article suggestions, but we do intend to add support for search of all kinds of content - native (articles and posts) and external content - to those search interfaces to provide a unified search experience.
It is currently on the 2022 roadmap so we expect to release it within the year, but as always we cannot 100% promise that as unforeseen events or challenges may change timelines and priorities.
-
This gap is creating a horrible user experience and leading to lost data on user behaviors and lost agent efficiencies. Is there a known workaround such as using a local hosted "stub" or redirection method to the external resource? Those using the federated search feature to work around other platform limitations or working the Docs as Code methodology, need a method to fill this feature to ensure we get the most reliable data on our end users' ability to find content, self-solve, improve our ticket deflection rate, and make the best use of Agent time.
Please sign in to leave a comment.
3 Comments