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Enable Article Suggestions on Messenger to help customers self-serve
Enable Article Suggestions on Messenger to help customers self-serve

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

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

Customers can have different preferences for searching for help. Some prefer finding answers on their own, whilst some prefer to select from a suggested list. Adding your Help Center to your Messenger helps you scale your support and empowers customers to help themselves directly from the Messenger.

The Article Suggestions card can be added to your Messenger above or below the "Start a conversation" card to increase your article view rates, help customers self-serve and reduce the customer resolution time.

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

You can also offer tailored experiences to different customers by requiring that they search for articles and see the suggested list before starting a conversation with your team. This enables you to minimize customers starting a conversation for repetitive questions which can be solved by help center articles.

Configure the Article Suggestions experience

In your Messenger settings, under "Add to Messenger home' you can configure the self-serve experience of Article Suggestions for visitors and users:

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

If you only want certain groups of people to be able to see the Suggested Articles, 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.

Next, choose if they should be required to search for help before starting a conversation with your team. This will remove the new conversation button from your Messenger for these visitors.

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.

Moving the Help Center Search card

To place your help content front and center, you can reorder the search bar in the messenger, so your customers see they can search before starting a new conversation.

How does it interact with outbound messages and bots?

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.

What’s it like for customers?

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

Note:

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

  • The "Suggested articles" are personalized for each user. We use Machine Learning to decide which article is most likely to be viewed, based on user's Custom Data Attributes (CDAs) and visited URLs.

  • 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.

Your customers can also collapse the article to a smaller view if they need to:

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

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


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