Zendesk

How to Set Up Zendesk Federated Search

  • 8 November 2019
  • 9 replies
  • 1134 views
Frank
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Sometimes community members are looking for an answer to a question that has never been asked on your community, but are available on your Zendesk Guide knowledge base.  

Using our federated search integration with Zendesk, your community members will be able to simultaneously search through your community content AND Zendesk Guide knowledge base. Saving them valuable time and increasing your self-service resolution rate.

Make sure you’ve followed the steps to install the Zendesk integrations:

 

How To Activate Federated Search 

Make sure that you have connected a Zendesk Support account to CC (following the steps above in "How To Install the Zendesk integrations").

  1. Go to Control → Integrations → Apps → Zendesk

  2. Click ‘Advanced filters’ to configure filters for language and categories

    1. Filter by language: Enter locale parameter of the language that you want to show in federated search (e.g. en-us)

    2. Filter by category: Enter the category IDs of the categories that you want to show in federated search, separated by a comma (e.g. 123564, 123721) – you can find the category ID in the URL, it’s the number directly after /categories/

  3. Enable the ‘Federated search’ toggle under Zendesk Support and wait for the confirmation banner. Federated search is now activated.

  4. Visit your community and validate if Zendesk Guide content is shown by trying some search queries.

Advanced filters:

  • Advanced filters are optional to configure. When you do not configure them federated search will display all languages and categories.
  • Advanced filters can only be configure when Federated search is Disabled.
  • When you create a new Zendesk Guide category and want to show it in Federated search you will have to add the category ID under ‘Filter by category’

💎 Change the “Zendesk” label in the live-search dropdown directly in the community or in Control → Customization → Phrases. Edit or Add the following phrase; Module: Forum, Key: federated.search.zendesk

🎯 Up to 3 Zendesk results are displayed in the live-search dropdown. Triggering the ‘View’ all link send the user to a search result page showing all results from Zendesk.

😌

9 replies

tiffany.oda
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Does the federated search also allow for Advanced Filtering by Zendesk “Section” (rather than “Category”)? 

Our Zendesk “Category” is very broad, but the articles are organized in the “Sections”. It’s the same format, where there is the ID after the /sections in the URL. 

Tiff
Blastoise186
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Hiya @tiffany.oda !

Your resident evil genius strikes again! Muhahahahahaha!

As far as I’m aware, I don’t think this is an option. But I’ve not found many inSided communities that have Zendesk Federated Search enabled and I can’t find your community. I’ve actually never come across any Zendesk instances that use “sections” as such in my travels, at least none that I can think of. But it’s also not helped by the fact ZD doesn’t make them very obvious. Blastoise says that and then suddenly remembers that he has seen this loads of times…

As far as I can gather from reading through inSpired though, it seems you can only filter at category level right now, rather than section level. But I like your style here and I would definitely recommend creating an Idea on this one! I’ve just tried to find any existing ones and nothing has come up, so you might get lucky in claiming a new one for your tally. :)

Bug blasting absolutely everything... The Blastoise Way
tiffany.oda
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Thanks @Blastoise186 - our community isn’t live yet, which is why you can’t find it (muahahaha back to you!). 

I’ll create an Idea about this. Looking at other companies who use Zendesk, it does seem like a lot of them use Sections to further segment their Categories. (I used the Miro Community as my example). I think our Customer Support team might need to do a lot of Category reorganization if we can filter by Section. Eek. 

Tiff
Blastoise186
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Oi! That’s MY line! XD

No-one except me is supposed to have the last laugh. :rofl:

The good news is that the Zendesk Guide/Help Centre API does have full support for searches by Section, just like it does for Category. So it’s probably not too difficult to make this a thing.

Mwahahahaha! :stuck_out_tongue:

Bug blasting absolutely everything... The Blastoise Way
Christa Brown
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Is there a way to exclude a category ID from your federated search?

I only have one category ID that I want excluded. It appears that my only option is to instead include all the other categories in the filter by category option. But this will be a lot more work and will also require me to keep updating this list as new categories are added moving forward. 

Christa
ryanne.perry
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I wanted to follow up on this as we would like to remove ‘Internal Only’ articles from customer view in the federated search in Community? It is not a good experience for them as they can see that there is an internal only article but when they click on it, it will bring them to a new link that says that they don’t have rights to access this page.

To remove these articles from their view, is that done in the back end of Zendesk or Community? @Frank 

FYI @Julian 

🌻 Ryanne
leo-inspired
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Userlevel 2
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Hey @ryanne.perry, to hide content you’ll need to select the category IDs of the categories that you want to show in federated search (see #2 in the guide)

 

Lauro Lana | Customer Support Engineer | Gainsight Customer Communities
ryanne.perry
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Thanks @leo-inspired! Do you know if ‘Sections’ is a similar terminology for this?

🌻 Ryanne
leo-inspired
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Hey @ryanne.perry, I think I answered you on the support ticket you’ve created. I am not sure if sections is the same as category on the Zendesk KB - you’d have to do some tests. Let me know on the ticket if you were able to adjust this 😁

Lauro Lana | Customer Support Engineer | Gainsight Customer Communities

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