Defining Custom Help Menu in Lightning Experience
By: Sujay Nadkarni
Tags: Helping Others, Salesforce, Lightning

We live in information age where we are bombarded with information. Our curious mind seeks help and we can seek answers by connecting via social media or hundreds of apps. Technology is now an enabler

and does not get into our way. Yet, somehow we sometimes feel lost while using corporate apps. We want answers but we dont know who to ask for help. This results in opening tickets, messages in slack channels, emails o

or phone calls. Tech teams end up answering the same questions fielded by different users and they end up wondering if they can ever get around this problem.

This is probably one of the underrated features of Salesforce but customizing help is a fantastic way to increase user engagement. Users can get to commonly asked questions or in-dept articles by simply clicking

on ? icon. This is also a blessing for tech or support teams as they can focus on key business initiatives while keeping their end users engaged and happy.

I think the use cases for customizing help menu are endless, you must decide which training issues or processes do you want your end users to see. In my Salesforce experience, here are most commonly asked questions:

a.) Open a ticket: Users need an easy way to contact their support teams.

b.) Training on creating reports: Users need access to data and most users dont know how easy it is to create reports/dashboards in Salesforce. If you have training videos, you can link them here. For this article, I will link to trailhead module.

c.) Questions about Insurace or 401K: Although HR makes every effort to be as detailed as possible, most employees have some questions about their policy or their 401K, etc.

d.) Price list: Sales wants easy access to price sheet, product list, etc.

Lets get started:

) Go to Set up and Search “Help Menu”

Note: Next step is not intutive. The first time I set up help assistance, I thought I could turn on the toggle to start the setup. I was frustrated and was about to open a ticket with Salesforce. But, here is how you turn on Sections.

2. Add a section title. In our case, I am adding “Demo Company”

You would think you can now click on the Toggle. Nope! You are probably thinking you can click on “New Resource” but see that option is greyed out.

3.) Hover your mouse in the Label section and click on the pencil.

4.) Do the same for URL and enter a URL.

Per our use case, I added 4 links — for product pricing, trailhead link to creating reports and dashboards, questions about Insurance and 401K as well as Open an IT incident.

Now, I really wanted “Open an IT Incident” to launch a flow such that user is taken directly to “Create” Screen. Since, I was not able to launch a flow, what I did instead was that I navigated to cases, Clicked on New, copied the link from the address bar and pasted in the help assistance. It worked like a charm!

My end result looks like this:

Give it a try and I am eager to see all your use cases.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Q. How many sections can I have?

A. Only one section is allowed. You can have upto 15 resources/links within that section. My personal opinion is that 15 links should cover most of your organizations’ frequently asked questions.

Q. I added resources but dont see a new section with resources in the help menu

A. Lets make sure you have saved changes. If you have saved changes, lets make sure that you are testing in an app. Your help menu in set up is going to be different than the one in the app.

Q. Can we have different help menu for each app.

A. Not at the moment. I personally would like to see this as we could have customized help for sales, service, HR, legal, etc. Feel free to vote for this idea: https://success.salesforce.com/ideaView?id=0873A000000U49SQAS

Q. I have added 5 resources but can only see 2.

A. Users can see only 2 resources to begin with. But, you can click on the section to expand and view all resources.