We’re excited to announce the release of our new Zendesk integration as a part of our community package. This integration adds as-you-type search to your help center in just a few clicks and can be integrated at no cost.

Why do you need a help center?

To quote Zendesk, you need a help center to:

1. Increase customer satisfaction by providing better service and meeting the needs of customers who prefer self-service.
2. Reduce costs and increase efficiency by eliminating repetitive costs so agents can focus on more strategic tasks.
3. Grow your business community and build deeper connections between your company and customers.

6 Tips for Building a Thriving Help Center by Zendesk

What if we told you that with this release, we can help you with both 1 and 2 on this list?

The Algolia Zendesk usecase

At Algolia, the whole technical team handles support because it gives us more insight into the frequently recurring questions and forces all of us to acknowledge our user’s pain points. By sharing their pain, we end up doing everything we can to help them find answers as quickly and easily as possible. Every email not written to support because the users were able to find the answer on their own is a win, for us and for them.

That’s why our documentation and FAQ are both searchable. We even embedded them in our Need help? widget that’s accessible from anywhere on the website.

Why is knowledge base search important?

When users visit your help center, they rarely want to browse it. Instead, they want to find answers to their question(s), as fast as possible. And a good search is an obvious way to help them achieve this. Zendesk’s own help center has a huge search bar to invite you to search before opening a ticket. Unfortunately, with a “type-keywords-press-enter” strategy, you often have to try multiple times before finding the answers you’re looking for.

That’s where Algolia comes into play. By providing as-you-type results, Algolia gives your users instant feedback on the keywords they’re currently typing, allowing them to quickly and easily narrow their search and find the information they need. Reducing friction for your users not only makes them happier but also helps your agents by reducing the number of repetitive questions they have to answer.

How to get started

The Algolia Zendesk integration is easy to install and only requires a few clicks and one copy/paste.

The integration automatically exports your Zendesk articles into your Algolia account and keeps them up-to-date. Not a single line of code needed!

On the front-end side, it adds:

Autocomplete to every search field in your help center

Instant capabilities to your search page

But don’t just take our word for it, try it live!
And just in case you missed it the first time—this integration is available for free!

Going further

This integration is actually creating an Algolia index and keeping it up-to-date, which means you can easily add an autocompletion menu using this data anywhere in your website/app without having to manage the indexing.

Finally, the whole code (crawler, JavaScript library and community website) is open-source under the MIT license. Your contributions are very welcome!

Related links:

• Community page
• Documentation
• GitHub repository

Get started