Search Is Back on Salesforce Help Nearly 2 Months After Community Backlash

Who knew removing a search bar from a website could cause an onslaught of community backlash? Well, Salesforce didn’t, that’s for sure. 

Nearly two months after Salesforce silently removed the search functionality from its Help page, it is now back on the site. But perhaps most importantly, the team behind it seems to have learned some important lessons in ease of access versus user experience. 

Search Functionality Disappears 

On September 29, the search bar that normally appears at the top of https://help.salesforce.com/ was quietly removed. Instead, users were forced to rely solely on the Agentforce agent to find answers to their problems. 

This resulted in a help request ticket popping up on IdeaExchange – Salesforce’s official community request forum. 

Tom Bassett, a Salesforce MVP and prominent voice in the ecosystem, was the one behind the ticket, stating that relying on Agentforce could “produce unreliable results and [take] longer to find the information you need”. 

“Turning Search back on would enable a UI that can be used to find trusted results and would give the power back to users as to whether they want to search using text or a conversation,” he wrote. 

Bernard Slowey, Salesforce SVP of Digital Success, wrote directly back to Tom, admitting that this had been an oversight based purely on existing data from the site. 

“The decision to remove the search bar was based on data analysis that showed an average of only 1.7% of Help sessions engaging with search, with trends pointing down,” he wrote. 

Ultimately, the decision was made to work on bringing the search functionality back based on community feedback, although it was not yet clear as to when this would happen.

The Return of Search 

Search functionality finally returned to the Salesforce Help page on Friday, November 14. This marks around seven weeks after it was initially removed.

Although it took some time to get here, it’s something that Bernard is keen for the community to understand has been a work in progress. 

“I made that call with my team, saying look – let’s take search down and go straight to Agentforce,” he told Salesforce Ben. “And my lesson learned was I made that call too soon.

“What was clear here is that the people who use search are power users of the Help portal. Our MVPs, our forum ambassadors… all of them people got pretty vocal as soon as the change happened, and I did some [feedback] calls with them, and so I learned the lesson.

“We truly believe in a vision of search and AI answers coming together, [but] we needed to keep search up for longer while we work on bringing these two experiences together on the product side: search and AI answers.”

Bernard explained that the search experience is exactly the same as it was before, and is a direct result of learning from community feedback. Not only that, but going forward, Bernard and his team plan to keep working with the community to make future product and feature decisions. 

“We’ve now set up this Agentforce Help Council – we’ve already set up its Slack channel,” he said. “We want to actually start driving regular engagements to it, where through this council we’ll meet regularly to share our roadmap, what’s coming, and then when we have things like this, then we can get their feedback on it. 

“So maybe it’s not such a surprise then when we make changes like this and they’re part of the change with us.”

Final Thoughts

It’s clear that Salesforce wants to do everything it can to increase Agentforce adoption and get its users more familiar with what it can do. However, through this method, the CRM giant has also learned that you can’t rush your users; they will need to get up to speed in their own time.

However, a future where search is made smarter through the power of AI is definitely one to look forward to, especially if Salesforce continues to take on feedback to make the technology the best it can be.