A few months ago, we launched help center integrations in CommandBar, and it’s become one of our most popular features. Teams produce awesome help center content, but users don’t always take advantage of it.
- You usually have to leave the app to find it
- It can be hard to find the article you’re looking for (or the specific paragraph in the article)
We shipped integrations with Zendesk, Intercom, WordPress, and others that brought help articles into the Bar so they could be easily searched.
Building off what we’ve learned so far, today, we’re shipping a whole new way to let users get help from your help center.
The HelpHub widget
With HelpHub, you can bring rich help docs right inside your app. Users can launch it with a button click and search it from the Bar (of course). Why build a dedicated widget for this?
Mainly, more space. The shape of the Bar sometimes isn’t ideal for displaying help content (it can be a bit small or narrow). HelpHub gives us plenty of space for making your help content fully readable in all its glory – including embedded images and videos.
Also, the dedicated widget lets us build help-specific experiences. For example, we’re working on two new things for HelpHub right now: “Articles that are popular on this page” and “Questions users like you ask.”
Semantic search (finally!)
One of CommandBar’s most popular features is the ability to add synonyms to commands in the Bar, so users don’t have to memorize your app’s vocab words to find what they’re looking for. Today, we’re introducing true semantic search for help content – in the Bar and HelpHub. That means we’ll surface articles that are relevant to the topic the user is searching for, not just the words they use.
When matches are found, we don’t just link out to that page but teleport to individual sections of the article that are useful. No need to command-f in the page to find the part that actually matters.
Instant answers
If you thought semantic search was cool, this is much cooler. Our instant answers features means users can get answers to questions they ask directly. You can configure these manually, or you can use our new AI tools to generate questions and answers for you based on your help center.
It’s like adding an eager new analyst to your team who’s happy to memorize all your docs and summarize them into a short answer in response to a user question.
Because the answers are pre-generated, you can review them for accuracy before making them findable. But you can also live on the wild side and let CommandBar answer user questions eagerly. That means if they ask a question and there’s no good answer in the list of instant answers, we’ll generate an answer on the fly.
Yes, this uses GPT-3 :)
Can I use the Bar and HelpHub?
Totally. If you have a help center integration set up, you can turn on semantic search and instant answers on from https://app.commandbar.com. You can also enable HelpHub. If you do, when users open docs from the Bar they will appear in the HelpHub. And you can also make HelpHub launchable independently from the Bar.
As always, you can use synced help docs in Nudges and Questlists too. These are helpful for steering users toward pieces of content you know are useful at different times in the user journey. For example, include a help doc in a Questlist that walks users through a new feature.
You don’t support the help center I use :(
These integrations are very easy to build, so let us know if that’s the case, and we can probably add it to the list :) We already support Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Wix, WordPress, Insided, GitBook, Ghost, Document360, and ReadMe.
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