Adding your Help Center to your Messenger helps you scale your support and empowers your customers to help themselves. People often prefer to find their own answers with self-serve support and the Messenger keeps it in the context of your website or app.

Offer a tailored experience to different segments of customers by choosing to display a Help Space, or requiring that they search for articles before they can start a conversation with your team. This gives your self-serve resources the best chance at resolving a customer’s question.

You have the option to enable a dedicated Help space from Messenger > Platforms > Web > Content > Spaces (or Mobile SDKs > Content > Spaces for your mobile app).

You can preview the Help space by selecting it from the options at the top of the Messenger preview.

This space gives customers access to your articles in a full, in-context Help Center from anywhere in your product.

Decide if you want to enable the Help space for visitors and/or users by selecting them at the top. For example, we can choose to disable the Help space for visitors and this hides it from the Messenger.

The Article Search app can also be added to your Messenger Home space to increase your rate of self-serve resolution:

In your Messenger settings, go to Web > Content > Customize Home with apps (or Mobile SDKs > Content > Customize Home with apps for mobile) where you can configure the self-serve experience for visitors and users:

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

You can set it up differently for visitors and users by switch between them here:

If you only want certain groups of people to be able to search and browse your Help Center, you can define audience rules here too. 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 use articles in your Messenger:

To place your help content front and center, you can reorder the Article search app in the Messenger, so your customers see they can search before starting a new conversation:

Next, choose if visitors and/or users should be required to search for help before starting a conversation with your team.

To set this up, go to Messenger > Conversations > Control inbound conversation volume.

Toggling off Require visitors to search before starting a conversation will remove the Send us a message button from your Messenger for visitors/users:

This requirement can also be tailored for a specific group of users. For example, if your team is always available for your VIP customers, add display conditions so only your free users have to search the Help Center first:

A user must meet the first set of audience rules before they can meet the second, otherwise they won’t be able to start a conversation or search/browse the Help Center in the Messenger.

Outbound messages and Custom Bots 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 outbound messages or bots on specific pages.

When someone opens your Messenger, they’ll see the option to search your articles wherever you've placed it in the Messenger, above or below the “new conversation” card (if they’re able to start new conversations):

By clicking here, they’ll see your Help Center’s collections which they can browse like this:

Or as they start typing, they’ll see live search results reflected here:

From an article, if they react negatively, they can also start a conversation with your team:

When a customer reacts negatively to one of your articles, they will be presented with an option to contact the team through the Messenger. The Operator will not start an outbound conversation with the user, regardless of your Task Bot settings.

New conversations are started as normal, with interactions from any bots you’ve configured to triage or targeted to answer.

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

Any configuration you choose for the Messenger on web, will also apply to the Messenger installed in your mobile app/s if you’ve updated to:

If you use an older version of the SDKs, your customers can still search the Help Center from the Messenger, but they’ll see an older — now deprecated — experience.

This is the same experience used when you send the Article search app in messages or bots. Read more about it here.

Learn how your articles perform in the Messenger vs the Help Center with the articles report.