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Hi Community 👋

We use Zendesk for our support and I am inquiring to see if anyone has input Community federate search into their customer facing side/help center.

It sounds to me like it can be setup with this guide but my real question is, if you’ve set it up would you be willing to share an example of what it looks like in Zendesk?

We are working to revamp our Zendesk guide and help center and it would be helpful to share with internal stakeholders in the proposal process.

Anything is majorly appreciated thank you! 

Hi @ryanne.perry - We have performed this action on our Zendesk instance. I was not involved in selecting the theme for the site, so I am not sure how universal our settings are, but I will share how we populate the results here:

  1. Select a unique Zendesk theme. I believe we selected the Mink template
  2. Within the theme is a folder titled “assets” which contains *.js files which correlate to different pieces of functionality on the site. One asset we use is the search-results.js file. 
    • Note here: I have no idea if this is standard or if this was set up by our developers. We hired contractors to do the setup work
  3. Within the search-results.js file, we have five functions:
    • First is a timeout function if the search is taking too long
    • Next is a function to update the properties of the title of the post found in the search. Basically removing special characters with a regex command. This is going to allow us to use it in generating the URL. 
    • Third is to generate the url. This requires:
    • Fourth function combines the information from the third function with the final pieces of the URL
    • Fifth function posts the results with the command(s) specified here: inSided API Documentation
  4. From here, the asset can be incorporated into the theme. Again - not entirely sure where it’s incorporated at, but with that we end up with something like the following:

 

 

 

I can’t share the *.JS files because these were created by our consultants. I only added some minor edits to them so that the search results are able to show Japanese/Chinese characters. I’m happy to comment on any API questions you have, though, since I’ve learned it for various parts of our business. 

Hope this helps!

Thank you @alexandra.culler! Super insightful. Is the photo a screenshot of what it looks like on your instance?

@ryanne.perry - Happy to help 🙂. And yup! That screenshot is taken from our Zendesk Knowledgebase. You can check out our Zendesk instance here: Knowledgebase (zemax.com). As you can see in my previous screenshot, the search results can be filtered on the page after the search has been conducted. We did not incorporate the Community results into the drop-down that appears as you type. I don’t remember if that’s because it would have been very difficult, or because we chose to incorporate the InSided search widget instead (shown below). 

 

 

If you can add the results to the live drop-down results, I imagine that would be preferable to users. That is...if that’s functionality Zendesk allows 🙂. 

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