Contextual Help: 5 Ways to Provide Relevant In-Product Support

When your product users hit a roadblock, how do you guide them through resolving their issues? Do they need to open a support ticket and wait for someone to get back to them? Or struggle to navigate complex help centers, only to leave their questions unanswered? That simply won’t do, as 81% of customers expect faster service as technology advances, and 73% expect better personalization.

Rather, companies can leverage contextual help tools to keep up with user support needs. After all, what’s faster than receiving instant, on-the-spot service?

This article will illustrate five different types of contextual help and outline the benefits of implementing this kind of support. Then, learn how Fluid Topics’ Enterprise Knowledge Platform (EKP) helps companies seamlessly implement these support options for a better product experience.

What is Contextual Help?

Contextual help, also called in-app or just-in-time assistance, is a type of user support provided in the context of where and when users need it. It aims to provide them with the right information as quickly as possible, eliminating the need for them to search for it, thereby reducing friction and potential downtime with products.

Companies can deploy contextual help through different systems including an embedded helpdesk, a chatbot, tooltips, walkthroughs, and inline instructions. These systems are available directly within product and software interfaces, creating more efficient support workflows.

Benefits of Contextual Help

Contextual help is typically the fastest way to help users and results in a few different benefits for companies that integrate these offers.

Minimizes Delays and Downtime

Offering in-context support features helps users access answers to urgent questions as quickly as possible without going back and forth to iterate on documentation search. For example, without access to the right information on hand, 95% of field technicians must plan follow-up visits, leading to increased costs. Conversely, accessing precise documentation for the specific product being installed, used, or repaired improves first-time fix rates and reduces downtime.

Enhances Product Adoption and User Engagement

Targeted information at the right place and time boosts user engagement and product adoption by ensuring they have access to training tools and relevant content to reach their goals faster. Users become increasingly self-reliant when they autonomously find solutions to their issues with contextualized experiences. Simultaneously, a smooth user experience that creates a clear path of value and helps them become experts in your product drives long-term product adoption.

Boosts Customer Satisfaction

72% of customers want immediate service, so with contextual support, you provide exactly what customers are looking for, right when they need it. Rather than having to search through irrelevant documents or navigate a generic helpdesk page, they get answers based on their actual product and situation. Contextual support delivers on the expected level of service, leaving users feeling empowered and pleased with the product experience.

5 Ways to Provide Contextual Help

With these advantages of integrating contextual help in mind, let’s look at the different types of in-product support that businesses may decide to implement.

1. Embedded Helpdesks

Embedded help is a great way to provide self-service support. This support is usually found in the form of a widget that users can click on to open the helpdesk. It offers real-time assistance, such as technical documentation, troubleshooting tips, and knowledge base articles, which are contextually relevant to the user’s current task on screen. Some embedded helpdesks automatically suggest documentation while others include an advanced search engine to first narrow down the information needed before offering results to users.

2. Chatbots

Chatbots function similarly to embedded helpdesks, often appearing as widgets within a product. Users can interact with them by clicking, entering their queries, and receiving quick answers. However, an AI-powered chatbot can take support to the next level. As an intelligent, automated support tool integrated within a product or application, it leverages artificial intelligence to offer real-time, context-aware assistance. The chatbot understands natural language, providing personalized responses, troubleshooting advice, or directing users to helpful resources, ensuring a smooth and efficient experience.

Their back-and-forth communication style makes users feel like they’re talking to a support agent directly within the product or software interface. This type of contextual help is particularly successful with McKinsey reporting that GenAI-enabled chatbots are 20% better at answering customer queries correctly and efficiently than the existing pre-programmed chatbots.

3. Tooltips

Tooltips, also called pop-up windows, are small descriptions that appear when a user moves their mouse over an icon, button, or link. The tips appear in a dialog box to provide specific instructions on how to interact with specific features or aspects of the product interface. This is particularly useful for conveying information to new users or about complex features. Once the user has read the information, they simply need to move their mouse off the trigger to make the message disappear.

4. Walkthroughs

Walkthroughs are a great way to guide users through the necessary steps to accomplish a specific task such as setting up their account, giving a guided product tour, or enabling a new feature. These are similar to a series of tooltips that appear one after another to provide the step-by-step instructions needed to guide the user from the start to finish of their task. However, unlike tooltips, this contextual help doesn’t require the user to scroll over a specific button to initiate the walkthrough. Additionally, while many walkthrough tips appear as small pop-up windows with text, they can also include short videos to show users what’s possible in a product alongside the instruction.

5. Inline Instructions

Inline instructions are succinct messages integrated next to or under instructions or text boxes. They are typically less than 200 characters. As small pointers, they ensure users fill in information correctly to avoid errors (i.e. Enter a business email address). As insights, they keep users updated on the latest and best practices for using a product or interface. Inline instructions are useful tools as they deliver high value in a short period of time. Users read the information in just seconds and instantly have a better understanding of the product without interrupting their workflow.

How Fluid Topics Adds Value

Providing direct insights and offering self-service options embedded in your product has never been easier with Fluid Topics’ AI-powered Enterprise Knowledge Platform. Fluid Topics offers the foundation of a documentation portal plus the advanced features needed to maximize the benefits of your documentation directly from within your products. You can effortlessly implement embedded helpdesks and AI-enabled chatbots or any of the three other in-product patterns mentioned above to bring your valuable product documentation straight to your users.

Together these advanced Fluid Topics features help companies reduce support costs, minimize downtime, and improve customer engagement and satisfaction.

Advanced Search Capabilities

Users finding the information they need directly in the product interface requires a custom-engineered, finely-tuned search engine. Unlike traditional search functions that rely solely on keyword matching, a next-generation search engine leverages advanced technologies like natural language processing and machine learning to deliver more relevant, accurate, and intuitive results. With Fluid Topics’ advanced search engine, users can search using conversational language or complex queries, and the system understands their intent and context to deliver the specific information they need, rather than just retrieving documents with matching terms. Such an engine can also refine search results based on user behavior or user profile and learn over time to better serve user needs. This enhances the user experience by making information more accessible. In parallel it boosts productivity as users spend less time searching and more time applying insights.

Metadata Management

Another key feature of EKPs like Fluid Topics is documentation metadata management. Metadata is information about your data, like invisible tags describing your visible text. It plays a critical role in contextual help and is one of the mechanisms that filters and targets content matching a situation.

Access to advanced tagging and metadata systems ensures the right content is dynamically delivered to users based on their roles, locations, preferences, or other contextual elements. In other words, metadata refines and contextualizes search results and answers for each user within contextual help tools. Solutions that leverage metadata management provide a better user experience by personalizing content for every user at the point of delivery.

Generative AI Tools

Generative AI is revolutionizing contextual help by providing real-time, personalized assistance. In order for GenAI applications to provide contextual assistance they need Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). RAG is central to this transformation, combining AI’s language generation capabilities with precise retrieval from a company’s knowledge content. To provide relevant answers, RAG needs content consolidated in a central location. As an EKP, Fluid Topics does just this, gathering content into a centralized repository to enable organizations to implement new GenAI content capabilities. As a result, RAG applications easily access trusted data to craft context-aware responses and provide accurate, reliable information to users. Businesses can then offer GenAI-powered user experiences via chatbot or embedded button. These applications can include:

• Summarizing documents or topics
• Generating a list of tools and parts required for maintenance procedures
• Providing explanations of specific code segments
• Offering step-by-step instructions

Applications also include any other experience that fits the specific company’s business cases, provided the EKP, such as Fluid Topics, provides the capability to easily prompt engineer their own GenAI assistants.

This kind of contextual help is the way of the future, with customer support leaders predicting that 80% of user inquiries will be resolved autonomously with AI tools instead of human intervention in the coming years.

Final Thoughts on Contextual Help

Offering contextual help is an essential feature for providing a seamless user experience. There are multiple types of in-product help for each moment where users may need extra guidance. Beyond quick tips, companies can use AI-powered tools like chatbots to differentiate their support. Integrating innovative technologies to help users is also a positive sign as 70% of customers see a clear gap emerging between companies that use AI well and those that don’t. Enterprise knowledge solutions like Fluid Topics are available with advanced native features to keep up with user expectations and needs.