Zendesk Guide and online store
A help centre anybody can read and a request form only account holders can use
A shop that runs its support content in a hosted help centre has published its delivery and returns answers to the whole internet and, on a great many of these help centres, has put the form for asking the follow up question behind a sign in. That combination changes what the assistant is. It is not a first line standing in front of a working escalation route. For a signed out shopper reading an article at ten at night, it is the only door in the building, and where the handover email lands matters more here than anywhere else.
Why this pairing is its own job
The Zendesk Guide install guide covers the tag, and the online store guide covers what the assistant has to know. What follows is the part that belongs to neither.
- Articles are served to anonymous readers and the request form frequently is not, so a shopper who has just read your returns article has nowhere to put the question the article did not answer. Check your own setting rather than assuming, because it decides whether the assistant is a convenience or the escalation path itself.
- The question that arrives most on a shop is the one it cannot touch. Order status is asked in the help centre rather than on the shop, because a worried customer searches for the tracking article, so the refusal and the handover get exercised on your highest volume question rather than on an edge case.
- The help centre and the shop are two origins holding two different bodies of material. The delivery table, the product pages and the basket are on the shop. The articles are here. Publishing the theme does nothing at all for the first of those, and a crawl of one reads nothing of the other.
- Returns split into two paths, the item somebody did not want and the item that turned out to be faulty, and a help centre is exactly where those get written as one article called Returns. One article means one answer, and it will be the wrong one about half the time it is needed.
What changes about the install here
<script src="https://cdn.askably.xyz/w.js" data-key="pk_live_YOUR_KEY" defer></script>The tag is the same one on the Zendesk Guide guide. Everything below is about where it goes on a online store site specifically.
Find out what a signed out shopper can actually do
Open your own help centre in a private window, read an article, and then try to submit a request. If you are asked to sign in, you have just seen what most of your traffic sees, because somebody who bought once as a guest has no account to sign in to and no reason to make one now.
That result decides the install rather than decorating it. Where the form is gated, the handover has to reach a person the same day, and the refusal has to get there in the first reply rather than after a paragraph about dispatch times.
It also decides what the handover asks for. A name and an email is enough on most sites. Here the message should carry the order number too, because whoever picks it up cannot find anybody from an email address alone.
The shop is a second install on a different platform
Publishing the theme puts the launcher on help centre pages. Your product pages, your delivery page and your basket are somewhere else entirely, built on a store platform, and the tag has to go in wherever that platform keeps custom markup.
List every origin a browser might see: the address the help centre answers on, the support subdomain if you mapped one, and the shop's apex and www form. An origin that is not listed renders nothing and names itself in the console, which is the fastest way to tell that apart from a tag that never saved.
Then decide whether the two share an assistant. They usually should, because a shopper does not know which of your two websites they are standing on, and the ordinary delivery question is answered from material on both.
Split the returns article before you index it
Write the unwanted path and the faulty path as two articles with two titles. Who pays return postage, how long the right lasts and whether a repair comes before a refund all diverge at that fork, and one blended article gives a retrieval step nothing to choose between.
Give each of them a first line in the words a customer uses, about not wanting something or about something breaking, rather than in the vocabulary of your own policy. The article that wins the match is the one that sounds like the question, not the one that is legally tidiest.
Where the answerable material lives
| The delivery matrix, which is not in the help centre | Every service crossed with every destination, the daily cut off, and what a weekend or a public holiday does to it. On most shops this lives on the store rather than in an article, so it has to be crawled from that origin. A help centre article summarising it is the version that produces the follow up question. |
|---|---|
| Two returns articles rather than one | The unwanted path and the faulty path, separately titled and separately written, with your own policy and the statutory position in your market stated as two things rather than merged into a friendlier average of the two. |
| An order lifecycle article, which is as close to order status as this gets | What each status in your confirmation emails means, how long each stage usually runs, when tracking starts moving and what to do when it shows nothing for a day. It is what lets the assistant be useful about orders in general while being honest that it cannot see one. |
| Duties, taxes and where you actually ship | Which destinations, whether the price a visitor is shown includes tax, and whether duty is collected at the checkout or charged on the doorstep. Nobody writes this article until the first angry message, and it decides whether a cross border basket becomes an order. |
The first thing to get right
Open the help centre signed out, read an article, try to submit a request, and set the handover address according to what happened.
Every other decision here follows from that one result. If the form is gated, the assistant is not deflecting anything, it is carrying the whole of your anonymous contact route, and an email sitting in a mailbox nobody opens until Monday is worse than the form the shopper could not use.
The failure that belongs to this combination
A refusal that points at a form the shopper cannot open
The order question arrives, the assistant correctly says it cannot look an order up, and then it does the helpful thing: it names the support form and links it. The shopper follows the link, meets a sign in screen, has no account because they checked out as a guest, and leaves.
Nothing in that exchange looks like a failure. The refusal was honest, the link was real, and the conversation record shows a clean handover. What it actually shows is a customer handed a locked door while standing in the one place on your website where the answers are supposed to be kept.
Word the refusal so it takes the details itself, in the same message, rather than sending anybody anywhere. Ask for the order number in the message, name the address it goes to, and then send yourself one from a private window and find out who opens it.
Before you go live
- The origin the page is served from has to be on the allowlist for that assistant, or nothing renders and the browser console says which origin was refused. An apex domain and its www are two different origins to a browser, so list both, along with any staging or preview host you want it to work on.
- Open the site as a visitor would, on the pages a online store visitor actually lands on, and ask it something only your own material could answer. A widget that renders is not the same as a widget that has read anything.
Questions
- Our request form is open to anonymous users. Does any of this apply?
- You have the easier version, and the useful part is what it changes: the assistant becomes a first line rather than the only line, so it should hand over quickly instead of trying twice. Check the setting rather than assuming it, because it gets changed by somebody dealing with spam without anybody connecting the two things.
- Can it tell a customer where their parcel is?
- No. It reads articles and documents and no article holds a live order. It can explain what each status means and how long each stage takes, then take the order number and the email so a person can look it up. That gap is felt more sharply here than elsewhere, because the customer is standing in the place where your answers live.
- Do we index the shop as well, or just the articles?
- Both, from the two origins. The articles answer process questions and the shop holds the delivery table and the category level sizing and care material. Leave individual product pages out, because a catalogue turns over faster than any crawl and an item you stopped stocking still reads in the present tense.
Keep reading
- Installing on Zendesk GuideEdit the help centre theme, add the tag to the footer template, publish the theme, and check what a signed out visitor can actually read.
- Everything for a online storeDelivery cut-offs, the returns window and restock questions get asked before purchase. The one thing an assistant cannot do is find an order.
- Publishing an article and publishing an answer are the same act hereA published article is a communication in the firm's name. Guide lets any agent publish one, and the corpus keeps it until the next crawl.
- A help centre on one domain and the commercial material on anotherThe help centre holds how-to articles. Plans, limits and trust pages live on your marketing site, a separate origin and a separate crawl.
- Rendering set per route, and the shop pages that end up emptyRendering is set per path here. On a shop that decides whether the sizing and care copy is in the served HTML or only in the browser.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.