Customer Portal Search Bar

Michele Bazzani April 5, 2023

I am having a heck of a time finding information on how the search bar on the Customer Portal functions. 

I am not talking about them searching their past tickets I am talking about the search bar at the top of my landing page.


Screenshot 2023-04-05 114317.png

 

I have been struggling with how to optimize this to find suitable suggestions, and nothing seems to work.  I have added standard keywords for all request types, labels, articles, etc. 

Aside from paying for yet another add-in, can someone explain how this works and how to make it work properly?

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Paul Wiggers
Community Leader
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Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
April 5, 2023

Hello @Michele Bazzani 

Sure thing!

The search bar searches through all articles in the Confluence spaces that are connected to your JSM instance. If you haven't connected any spaces, then you will see no results.

Here is how you can link spaces: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/link-confluence-spaces-to-your-service-project/

By default, it searches on labels. I like to believe it is also smart enough to search the text but I am not certain that works as well as I would like to. Using labels on your articles is your safe bet.

While you can limit the amount of articles suggested on certain requests types, you cannot limit the search bar that easily. If the space and page is available and has the correct permissions, it will show.
If you want to block customers from finding a page, you have to limit the page permissions in Confluence.

Does this help in any way?

Michele Bazzani April 5, 2023

So I have created keywords for specific request types, and I was hoping that when a user types in the name of an application "Sharepoint", the request type that supports that is shown first, and instead, I get a whole bunch of types.

I will try the labels, though, and maybe I can make that work.  Is that the only thing that it searches on from that bar?  Only Confluence?

Paul Wiggers
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
April 5, 2023

Yes, the portal is your customers gateway to Confluence articles and filing requests from the project portal. 

Unfortunately, you cannot search for request types. If you want to make it easier for your customers to find the correct request type, you can work with portal groups.

There you can combine several related requests types together.

For instance you can have a portal group "Hardware" and withing you can have request forms for "Request new laptop" "Fix the printer" or "My plant is dead".

Michele Bazzani April 5, 2023

So we have that, and they are still having issues.  We went from an old system that asked them 2 questions and then gave them an open text box to Jira where we are categorizing things so that I don't need to pay an FTE to triage every ticket.  While we aren't the busiest place in the world in 93 days we have processed over 6k tickets across 4 service projects, so that's a lot of triage work that we avoid with all the new options.

I have been trying to make it easier but this search bar is poo. :( 

Paul Wiggers
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
April 5, 2023

I am sorry, it looks like I was mistaken. 

The search bar actually searches request types as well. I have just tried it out in our own environment and was pleasantly surprised that it showed request types as well.

It does limit the search results as well, but the search term needs to be specific. 

But still, customers can use the Portals > Select the portal group > Select the correct request type. Sometimes they need a little convincing. Sending out documentation, preferably with a video, will help them in their journey as well. 

And to be honest, 6K tickets in 3 months is a lot compared to what we are receiving. We have just hit 7.5k in 10 months.

Michele Bazzani April 6, 2023

@Paul Wiggers 

Thank you for your help.  We have created training guides with video walkthroughs etc.  I also created a site map in Confluence that users can search for terms and it will lead them to where they should put in their tickets but we are still hearing they are having trouble finding things. 

One final question, is there a way to optimize the search with keywords or anything on the different request types that will gain a better result?

Thank you

-M

Paul Wiggers
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
April 6, 2023

Do you mean article suggestions when people are filling in a request?

If you do, then yes! You can limit the articles that are suggested by limiting the articles based on labels. 

Go to Project Settings > Knowledge base and assign the labels to the different request types

Screenshot 2023-04-06 at 15.45.08.png

If that is not what you mean, please elaborate so I can help you find a better answer.

Florian Müller February 2, 2024

Hi @Michele Bazzani ,

its a little dirty workaround but it works for us. I added keywords to the description field of the request type with {anchor: KEYWORD, KEYWORD} . 

Snag_5d2af3.png

At the moment we dont connected confluence to the JSM Projekt. The anchor helps to make the keyword invisable in the portal view. 


 

 

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