When your customers are looking for an answer to their question, they often start by searching on your business’ FAQ page. But, as you probably know yourself, the answer can sometimes be found on a different part of your website. There is a lot of valuable information hidden outside the help center. So what do you do? Copy all relevant information into your help center? Not very efficient, all that duplicate content… Enter Zendesk’s latest feature, Federated Search, to solve it for you.

Let’s make it concrete and start with an example. An e-commerce website consists of many products and all kinds of relevant information that’s stored outside of the help center. Your main website pages, product catalogs, and blog also contain interesting information for your customers. Including all this information in a federated search gives your customer a smoother experience and it also increases sales. Plus, a good customer experience boosts brand loyalty.

Now let’s dive into the more technical stuff.

External content visible thanks to Federated Search

Zendesk’s newest feature makes all your content visible to your customers, not only what is in your FAQ section. Federated Search helps users find what they are looking for. And that answer might be in a different section than your help center. It can also be in blogs, other knowledge bases, learning management systems, etc.

The search results are not limited to your help center articles or community posts. Federated Search lets you surface all your great content hosted outside your Zendesk help center. The search results will consist of both help center content and external content in one unified ranking on the search results pages. A user can then filter their search by type, for example, only blog posts, website pages, or help center articles.

Win-win for you and your customer

Zendesk’s Federated Search makes life easier for both you and your customer. Isn’t that wonderful? You don’t have to make sure that you copy all relevant content to make it available in your help center, making it easy to manage your data and tools. But, the user can still find an answer to all of his questions in one place.

So, why do you need federated search on your website?

• It enhances customer experience
• It makes it easy to expand your website in the future
• A user can browse your website more easily
• The search results are more relevant

Federated search is also a solution for big corporations whose information is stored on different websites. For example, a bank with separate websites for private customers, businesses, investment banking, and another for recruitment. When searching your website, you want your customer to find all relevant information stored in different categories, so they don’t have to switch websites to find the content they are looking for.

Want to see how it works firsthand? Check out our own help center! Of course, we had to try the federated search bar ourselves to gather all information from our website in one place.