Zendesk + Algolia: A Discovery Experience to Delight Your Customers

Forrester Research tells us that 76% of consumers use self-service Help Centers to find answers to their questions. Your support team spends hours creating those answers—what good is all the work if they can’t be found? At Algolia, we are all about accelerating the find and improving the customer experience.

A little under two years ago, we released an extension for Zendesk, our first integration with a Help Center solution. Today, we are proud to become an official Zendesk Guide and Zendesk Guide Enterprise partner.

Building better customer experiences

Zendesk and Algolia have a shared goal of empowering businesses to be more reliable, flexible, and scalable—and, above all, empowering them to build best-in-class customer experiences.  Our partnership makes the goal easily attainable.

The concept of frustration and wasted time in seeking support is fast becoming obsolete. To provide great customer experiences, we must meet or exceed user expectations previously set by big players like Google and Amazon. Search is the primary mode of discovery across the web: making it powerful is critical to reducing the friction for users to find the right answers.

Here is what Algolia brings to your Zendesk Help Center:

• Instant answers (even to mistyped questions). You can direct customers to the right content with results that update with each keystroke, regardless of typos. An advanced search reduces the number of support tickets and elevates customer experience at the same time.

• Federated search. It’s not just about the support center. Break down content silos and empower your customers to find answers across all of your content.
• Analytics & insights. Truly understanding your users’ intent is key to improving your support center content. Most companies build their support center content based on recurring requests from their customers. That’s a nice way to prioritize which content is most relevant to your users —but here’s a better one: a powerful analytics tool. Looking at your search analytics will help prioritize new Help Center content, based on what your customers are searching for—including queries returning no results.

• Fully customizable. Our code is open source. Make it your own and design the experience that best fits your brand.

Wins from the frontlines of customer support

For Derek Daniels at Handshake, a self-service knowledge base was a must-have to enable their three different customer constituencies to find the right information quickly and easily. In looking for a solution to connect customers with the content to solve their issues, the Handshake team discovered the Algolia for Zendesk Guide integration. Since enabling the integration, Derek found significant drop in browsing category pages “as people started using search to find the articles they needed to resolve their issues instead of wandering aimlessly through the Help Center.”

“Algolia enhances Handshake’s Help Center search, provides the Handshake team with better analytics on what people are searching for, and helps customers by surfacing more relevant articles.”

Our customers have seen results including a 27% decrease in basic support questions, lower numbers of tickets submitted to support, decrease in ticket resolution time, improved federated multilingual search, and enhanced relevancy for all queries.

Getting started

For Algolia and Zendesk customers, we made it a simple 3-step process; details here.

If you haven’t tried us out yet, sign up for a free trial with Zendesk and Algolia. We promise to improve your Help Center experience for you and your customers.