Refining Contextual Search Results without changing the Short Description field

[Sarup Paul]

The Contextual Search is an excellent feature that provides a task assignee the ability to access the Knowledge base during the resolution process. As a part of that process, knowledge articles can be viewed and attached to the task (e.g. Incident, Case).

Learn how you can Deflect and resolve incidents with knowledge and configure your contextual search for a form.

The search results are typically driven OOB by the Short Description field (as you can see from the example above, showing an Incident). In order to refine the search results, typically you would need to update the short description field to search terms that may help in finding better knowledge search results. This creates a risk. This field is visible to the caller/requester, and any accidental saves (after altering the value to refine search) will lead to the loss of the original value entered by them.

Configure an added field to reduce risk and improve Knowledge search

There is an easy way to avoid this by configuring an additional field (in addition to the OOB Short Description field) to drive contextual search. The resulting behavior would be the standard behavior of displaying Knowledge search result on load, but then the user can use the new field to drive the search results. Additionally, the refined search term is saved with the Incident, and can be used later for tuning the search behavior using the meta field.

For how to use Knowledge search for incident deflection see Using meta tags in Knowledge Base articles to improve SEO and reduce incidents and how to fine tune Knowledge search for more information.

How to configure contextual search to your advantage

In this example we are going to use the Incident table to show you how to configure your contextual search to your organization's advantage.

1. Configure Contextual Search for the relevant task form - Define contextual search for a form. (Ignore this step if Contextual Search results are already configured).
2. Add a field to the relevant task table.
   • Navigate to System Definition>Tables>(Search for) Incident
   • Under the Table Columns related list, click New
   • Add a new field "Alternate Search Term"

     

3. Configure the Incident form to show the new field under the "Short Description" field
   • Navigate to Incident > Create New > (right click on header) Configure > Form Layout
   • Move "Available Search Term" from the Available to Selected slush bucket and move it right below "Short Description".

     

4. Add a new field to the Table Configuration
   • Navigate to Table Configurations > (search for) Incident [incident]
   • Under the Search Fields related list, click New
   • Add the previously configured field from the Incident table here. Ensure that the order is > 100 (which is the default value for the OOTB configured Short Description field)

     

Create the appropriate field level access control on the new field so that it's only visible to the internal team.

Refined Contextual Search results without changing the Short Description field

When you open an existing incident, by default, the Contextual Search results will show under "Related Search Results". This is driven by the "Short Description" Field. In this case, the search results are based on "email issue".

To change the search results, you can update the "Alternate Search Term" field. In the example below, see the results are based on "windows issue"

Hope you find this useful

Cheers !!