In-app "help" widget

Hey, team - curious what you all are using as it relates to inside your web app, help widget?

For context, we are using SFDC for our service and community clouds. The challenge is, we just learned that unless we have a consultant build something there isn't a way to surface help inside of our tool from the content stored in SFDC Knowledge. In a perfect world the widget would hover within our app regardless of the page you are on and can surface relevant content or allow you to search the knowledge content. Picture is from how SFDC does it today.

I know that Zendesk and Gainsight PX have similar functionality and that people also leverage AI Chat Bots to surface content as well. Ideally this tool would allow us to pull in content from SFDC Knowledge as that is where it all lives vs. having to rip out what we already built for a brand new tool with their own knowledge repository.

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Comments

Philippe Mesritz

@Brian Hartley , it's pretty sophisticated depending on what you're trying to do. AI is actually one of those terms people use and the technology doesn't, typically, get the results -- a strong workflow and design works better while having human assistance to help where needed gets you a long way. AI itself is on the radar -- realistically speaking, true AI is only in the movies

Bots, however, is something that can be layered in front. Check out khoros.com for an early example of what it does just to help route people more effectively - that's our "sales" version that helps route a person, but there's also a support version that we run (all in the same back end) that helps surface the right areas of our Community. We're working on adding more functionality each month.

The level of complexity is really dependent on what you're trying to do -- a simple execution can be spun up in a few weeks while a more complex one just requires a lot more design. Both the bot solution and Modern Chat solution (built off the same back end platform) integrate with various CRMs and can reach out to pretty much anything that has APIs.

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For your specific use case, I'd say you could use Pendo or WalkMe for the initial, but neither of those would let you get into the next deflection concept or open up chat as a channel -- that's something our product could conceptually help with.

Andreas Knoefel

Adding another option: SmartKarrot, an emerging CS startup. Their reactions can be triggered on user behavior and allow them to engage proactively.

Kodak Maharaj

@Brian Hartley that's funny! I just realized another comment mentions WalkMe as well so not shocked there. Good luck with the search

Brian Hartley

Ironically just submitted for a demo request today @Kodak Maharaj !

Kodak Maharaj

@Brian Hartley that makes sense, thanks for clarifying. Since the Salesforce KB tie is critical, another option might be WalkMe - are you familiar with them?

I've never been part of a company that's used WalkMe but I have experienced onboarding from a customer perspective leveraging WalkMe and it's a good experience. From my understanding, it's centered more on new customer journey but I'm sure there are ways to cater it to long-term customers based on where they are in-app

Thomas Seelbinder

@Brian Hartley We can have "Resources" in WalkMe which link to an external site which we use to send the user to our Groove KB. That's one part of our in-app widget. The other part is a guided walkthrough which users overlays to guide the user through the feature i.e Click here, now type in this field, click save.

Brian Hartley

Hey @Kodak Maharaj - ideally the knowledge can be contextually related to the in-app experience but not a hard/fast requirement. We just need a widget with the ability to surface content from our Salesforce Knowledge object.

Brian Hartley

Hey @Philippe Mesritz - the initial purpose is to surface help articles within the app without the user having to launch a completely different site. Over time if we can leverage AI and Chatbots to deflect that would be great. Sounds like your solution is pretty sophisticated? Are there a lot of integration points with Khoros or is it out of the box?

Brian Hartley

Hey @Thomas Seelbinder by link, do you mean just links to your Groove KB? Or are the articles themselves surfacing in the WalkMe widget?

Kodak Maharaj

I know we chatted about this briefly last week but a lot of what we do is leveraging widgets to present knowledge to customers at specific parts of their journey. Its a common use case for us and a topic I’m sure will be covered in the virtual wine-tasting you’ll be joining us for.

Out of curiosity, is your goal to have the knowledge reflect what part of the app your customers are in?

And if so, would the search functionality allow them to search all knowledge or only articles specific to that part of your app?

Philippe Mesritz

I think it really depends on what the purpose is -- is it to help customers drive through to self-service and solutions? To provide help via in-app chat? Something else?

Pendo is an excellent in-app walk through, pop-up, and guide menu. We use it to tie into our community for scraping self-service & documentation and then also will be working on serving up chat as well, but it's leveraging multiple solutions (Khoros Community & Khoros Modern Chat - our own product line, so please take that with an appropriate grain of salt as you will).

Philippe

Thomas Seelbinder

We use WalkMe for all of our in-app walkthroughs. They include an in-app menu feature that allows our users to search for answers, we can either link them to our Knowledge Base (groove) or fire up a walkthrough and walk the user through the solution.

Brian Hartley

Hey @Shaun Porcar I believe we felt that Outreach.io met more of our needs than Drift (as we viewed drift as in-app sales triage). There is a chance we didn't utilize it to its full potential.

Shaun Porcar

Let us know what you learn. Also curious to hear why/what replaced drift for sales enablement use if you don't mind sharing.

Brian Hartley

Thank you @Alex Tran . I just sent you a separate email with a follow-up question.

Brian Hartley

Thanks @Shaun Porcar . We used drift on the sales enablement side but recently terminated our subscription. I will have to take a further look

Alex Tran

@Brian Hartley I'm a bit biased but Gainsight PX does this pretty well, objectively speaking.

With PX, you can have the help widget on any page/URL you want, you can target customer segments and they'll see their personalized bot (e.g. Mature users vs. Onboarding users). Also, with PX you will be able to link specific articles and in-product tours that customers can access at anytime.

Also, users can submit feedback and re-route the feedback to an email alias, like a support email alias.

Below is an example of what it could look like when you search for articles on the widget.

Shaun Porcar

@Brian Hartley Have you looked into Drift? Used that most recently and found it to be a cost-effective solution for what you're describing since we had already integrated the app to allow us to provide live help in our product. Reasonable to configure as well.

Edit: We were using Zendesk for our KB though so I'm uncertain if integration with salesforce in the way that this requires is possible. Might be worth reaching out to their team to find out. https://gethelp.drift.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019504694-How-to-Connect-Drift-with-Your-Support-Knowledge-Base

Scotty

@Brian Hartley I'm not saying I know the answer on this one. At Lotus and IBM, we always built our technical help content in the best place possible. That did mean multiple systems might be in play.

Why?

We had so much volume that we had an editing team to keep a high content standard. So the system must work for editing, creating, and archiving. Look at your total Knowledge Management story when you make your decision.