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Enable public article suggestions in the Messenger
Enable public article suggestions in the Messenger

Simplify customers’ search for help by providing suggestions to public articles even before they start searching.

Jordan Shefrin avatar
Written by Jordan Shefrin
Updated over a week ago

The Article search card can be added to your Messenger to increase your article view rates, help customers self-serve, and reduce the customer resolution time.

Article search enables customers to search your Help Center and can automatically suggest articles to them. You can offer tailored experiences to different customers by requiring that they search for articles and see the suggested article list before starting a conversation with your team.

You need the Help Center product turned on to ensure this works as expected.

The Help Space must also be enabled in Messenger > Layout & Spaces to use this feature.


Configure the Article Suggestions experience

In Settings > Channels > Messenger > Customize Home with apps you can add and configure the Article search card for visitors and users.

In this example, we’ll set it up for visitors, but the steps are the same for users.

Add an audience rule

If you only want certain groups of people to be able to see the Article search card and suggested articles, you can define audience rules. For example, if you only have articles for a certain version of your product, you could restrict the Help Center to people who use that version.

Just click + Add audience rule, and choose the criteria that your customers must meet to search articles in your Messenger.

Configure article search

Click on the card settings to enable Suggested article. This will automatically suggest up to 4 articles to customers who can view the Article search card in the Messenger.

The suggested articles are personalized for each customer using Machine Learning, Custom Data Attributes (CDAs), and visited URLs to decide which article is most likely to be viewed.

Here, you can choose to exclude some articles from being suggested on the Article search card.

This can also be managed from the Knowledge Hub by opening a public article Details > Article suggestions section and toggle on/off the option to "Exclude from article suggestions".

Next, go to Settings > Channels > Messenger > Control inbound volume to choose if customers should be required to search for help before starting a conversation with your team.

This will remove the "start new conversation" button from your Messenger for these visitors. 👇

A visitor/user must meet the Article search card audience rules before they can meet this requirement, otherwise they won’t be able to start a conversation or search/browse the Help Center in the Messenger.

Moving the Article search card

To place your help content front and center, you can reorder the Article search card in the Messenger using drag and drop from Settings > Channels > Messenger > Web > Customize Home with apps.

How it interacts with outbound messages and workflows

Proactive Support messages and bot messages in Workflows send proactively. When these send, they start a conversation whether or not a customer has browsed content in the Messenger.

If you want your customers to see your articles when they first open the Messenger, you may want to turn off any Proactive Support messages or Workflows on specific pages.


Customer experience

When someone opens your Messenger, they’ll see the option to search your articles with a list of suggested articles wherever you've placed the Article search card on the Messenger Home.

Note:

  • Customers will only be able to see articles that they’re permitted to view in your Help Center.

  • Your customers could have an article suggested that they have recently viewed.

  • If the user/visitor clicks into the Search articles field, collections and articles will appear here in the same order as your Help Center.

  • If you don't support your customer's language, the default language of your Help Center will be shown. However, if you've localized your Messenger and your articles, help content will be shown to match your user's browser language.


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