Once you’ve enabled Answer Bot, you can create triggers to direct Answer Bot to send results to your end users, and update existing triggers to do the same. Trigger conditions determine when Answer Bot suggestions are sent to an end user, and trigger actions determine what information in included in the email response.
This article discusses the following topics:
Related articles:
- Using Answer Bot in email notifications
- Best practices: Setting up Answer Bot triggers, views, and workflows
- Answer Bot resources
You can also view the following video tutorial:
Creating new triggers for Answer Bot
If you're creating a new trigger, make sure you're familiar with the process. See Creating and managing triggers for information.
To create a trigger that includes Answer Bot
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Business Rules > Triggers.
- Click Add trigger.
- Create the trigger conditions. For example, you may want to have Answer Bot send an email with suggested articles to an end user as soon as they submit a help request, but only from a mobile device. That trigger would include the following conditions:
- Ticket | Is | Created
AND
- Requester: Role | Is | (end user)
AND
- Ticket: Status | Is | New
AND
- Ticket: Channel | Is | Mobile
- Ticket | Is | Created
- Next, configure the trigger to perform the following action:
- Notifications: Answer Bot | (requester)
This establishes that all tickets that meet the above conditions will send your Answer Bot email (see below) to the ticket requester.
- Notifications: Answer Bot | (requester)
- When you select Answer Bot from the Actions drop-down, the Answer Bot email field appears:
- Fill out the subject and body text you want to include in the Answer Bot email. Use the following placeholders to customize the email text. You can also click View available placeholders to view and copy placeholder text:
-
{{answer_bot.article_list}}
Required. You must include this placeholder for the feature to work. This placeholder adds a list of up to three articles that best match the request, links to those articles, and inserts buttons the end user can use to choose which article solved the request.
Note: This placeholder includes two pieces of text that are determined by the user's profile language: The header Do any of these articles answer your question?, and the two buttons located underneath each suggested article Yes, close my request and View article. -
{{answer_bot.first_article_body}}
Optional. This placeholder renders the first matching article (full HTML) into the email body, allowing end users to read the article and solve their problem without needing to leave the email experience.
-
{{answer_bot.article_count}}
Optional. This placeholder allows you to create an optional condition to send different body copy to customers based on how many articles are returned, for example:
{% if answer_bot.article_count > 0 %} Here are some great articles that may help: {{answer_bot.article_list}} {{answer_bot.first_article_body}} {% endif %}
Note: Answer Bot is not compatible with the{{header}}
placeholder, which is an unsupported and deprecated placeholder that some customers may still be using in their HTML Email Template. The HTML Email Template can be found here: Admin > Channels > Email > Email Templates > HTML templateWhile this placeholder currently functions with standard email notifications, it produces a malformed header in Answer Bot Notifications. To resolve the issue, remove this{{header}}
placeholder from the Zendesk HTML Email Template. To replicate the look and feel of this placeholder, you can add the following code (with appropriate styling added as desired) to the Email Body section of your account's Notify Requester triggers.<a href="{{ticket.link}}">Ticket #{{ticket.id}}: {{ticket.title}}</a>
-
{{answer_bot.article_list}}
- In the section Configure article labels and test Answer Bot, click Configure and test to filter the list of offered Help Center articles based on labels:
- Ticket brand: Use the drop-down to select a brand to run the test on. The brand selected here is purely for testing purposes, and will not be added to the trigger you are creating.
- Ticket subject: This field is used to test the articles returned when a ticket is filed with this subject.
- Ticket description: Enter a short description of seven or more words, written from the ticket submitter's perspective.
- Article restrictions by label: Enter labels you want to use to filter the articles. As you type into the tag field, autocomplete displays available labels beginning with the same word or characters. Any articles with any of these labels will be used as potential Answer Bot articles.
- Click Show suggested answers for a list of articles the user may receive if these labels are applied when submitting a similar ticket. If you approve, click Apply labels; if you don't, edit the entries and try again, or click Cancel.
- Click Submit.
The new trigger appears in the list on the triggers page, as well as on the Answer Bot admin page.
Converting an existing trigger for Answer Bot
If you're editing triggers, make sure you're familiar with the process. See Creating and managing triggers for information.
To convert an existing trigger for Answer Bot
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Business Rules > Answer Bot.
- Find the trigger you'd like to convert from the Recommended triggers list. . If your trigger is not listed there, it likely doesn’t meet the essential conditions needed for Answer Bot triggers.
- When you've found the trigger you want to convert, click the Edit button. The trigger's edit page opens.
- In the triggers Actions section, click the Convert to Answer Bot button.
This updates the trigger, including adding the Answer Bot placeholders into the email body.
- Edit the email as needed, and click Save. The trigger now includes Answer Bot functionality.
72 Comments
Hi Mike,
Ultimately, it's the price I'm sad to say. Thanks!
AnswerBot looks great and definitely something of interest to us.
The problem we have is not the feature or price, its the limitation that 99% of our tickets come through Zendesk Live Chat and then get created as tickets with transcript. This means only 1% of our tickets could currently potentially be auto-solved and therefore not saving us much resource.
What's the plan for Answer Bot and Chat, will there be a way for self-service to work in the same way, allowing us the ability to send a link which shows linked articles that could be the answer etc?
Hey team,
Looking for some help with preventing answer bot from firing under the following use case:
We use GMAIL to reach out to members to carry out some investigations...this email address is linked to ZENDESK as a support email.
So if the member replies to our inital email, answer bot will send back help centre articles based on their content.
how do you deactivate an answer bot trial within guide?
Hi,

Im trying to create an answer bot and it will trigger by which group of department you select and answer bot will reply to the requester, but its not working here's my condition.
can you help me about this?..
Hi all, Ian - extending Answer Bot to channels such as Chat is definitely something we are working through - we want to make the Answer Bot experience there work as seamlessly as you'd expect and need - stay tuned for updates!
Neil, if that reply-to address is a unique incoming email address, you can build the trigger to exclude that - I might escalate your request to our support team to help you with that if you need assistance?
Claire, you just need to revert any triggers you setup for Answer Bot and then let your trial lapse - no need to deactivate as such.
Rovi, let's send your question in to the support team and I can take a look at your account and help you get setup. In some cases the "Is new" condition causes the Answer Bot trigger to not fire because a different trigger which has run prior has changed the status to open already - we recommend changing that to "status is less than solved". Happy to dig into that further with you :)
Thanks everyone!
Just set upAnswerbot today and we have a few basic questions.
1) We use fields to track subject, plan type, etc. Is there a way to autocomplete those fields (like in a macro) when using Answerbot?
2) In our test, when someone checks that the article solved their issue, the ticket is created and solved. If they reply to the ticket again, it doesn't re-open, is there a way to change that?
Hi all,
AnswerBot is working great for us so far! I do have a lot of users who accidentally have clicked on "yes, close my request" and have emailed us back to follow up since their request wasn't actually solved. I believe it's the highlighted button that draws people to click. Is there a way to edit the code here to remove the highlighted color? I was recommended to add additional text for users to not click on "yes, resolve my request." Thanks!
Hi everyone,
Perhaps I missed this step but I have a question about enabling Answer Bot. Once I enable it, do I need to set up triggers or are there automatic triggers that come with it? I just want to fully understand before I press GO.
Thanks for your help!
Hi Michael, once activated you need to setup your triggers to make Answer Bot work. We do create an "example" trigger which is locked to fire only for you, which the on-boarding process will step you through to help explain how to setup the trigger.
We specifically don't try and automate the trigger creation process to avoid causing user experience issues for your customers. So activating has no direct impact, it'll still require configuration before it starts working.
Hi Mike
That is what I was thinking would happen. I have reviewed those sections and just wanted to make sure I was not missing anything. Thanks for your help and quick response!
No problem :) Let us know how you go and if you have any issues or further questions.
Ok another question, if I am correct, if I add labels to the trigger it will focus more on just those articles. Or I could add a label to all articles I want to show so that Answer Bot always looks at those.
So my new question is we have articles written just for internal use, if I do not add a Label to the trigger will it try to suggest those articles even though we do not want it to?
Just want to verify I am understanding properly.
Thanks for your help!
Hi Michael, Answer Bot will already automatically only show articles that the requester has access to, so internal articles will be excluded by default if they don't have access. We recommend avoid using labels unless you really need, this article goes into more detail: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115012444447-Best-Practice-Using-labels-with-Answer-Bot
Hi Mike
Thank you for the response. That makes sense. I really appreciate all the help throughout this. We should be good to implement this week.
Thanks again!
Is there any way to remove "Do any of these articles answer your question?" from {{answer_bot.article_list}}, as we find a lot of customers will reply saying "Nothing helped", but also, it means that having something like the below statement looks really bad.
Hi team,
We love the idea of Answer Bot in giving customers the info they need before we are able to respond. The problem we are seeing is customers mistakenly clicking the "solve ticket" when in reality they still need assistant (and our agents never see it). I saw last year that wasn't a possibility:
Hey Loretta, I can't answer your specific question as I use a custom implementation and not answer bot but as I am the person that posted the same question I'll tell you what we ended up doing instead.
1. Find a condition that fires when the end user self solves using answer bot. (a tag is probably best)
2. Create a trigger that recognizes it. In that trigger fire off an email to the customer telling them that they've indicated that their issue is resolved by pressing the button and that if they still need help or pressed it in error to reply back thus re-opening the ticket and preventing the false solve. This eliminated a lot if these issues for us. Good luck.
Hi Loretta, we cover some of this advanced workflow implementation here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115011210367-Best-practices-Setting-up-Answer-Bot-triggers-views-and-workflows#h18sj62nx6mm1yuf1ro1puuvsqxzhxpv
Hope that helps!
I want a DIFFERENT auto-response to my users for > 0 articles and = 0 article suggestions - is there any way to do this, or will the feature be expanded to have this ability?
I want to treat answer bot suggestions as the first reply to a customer, which would have different verbiage than when there are no articles suggested.
Because {{answer_bot.article_list}} is required, I can NOT set up a "if article count = 0 then use this reply" logic (or <1% etc. - I've tried a couple different rules).
For example, I tried this:
And the second IF clause resulted in this error in the email:
Liquid error: Unknown operator =
Side-note: Is it possible to preview the email template anywhere in ZenDesk, or see the email sent to the customer? This would help with spotting error messages like the above, or other issues with my template.
@Angela, to avoid the liquid markup error simply use 2 equals signs. I.e. article_count == 0. That should allow you to achieve what you're after.
Is there a way to customize or redesign the way we show article listings or ask for resolution with Yes and No buttons?
Basically I want to add some more styling to it. I can do that with the email content using HTML in email body of triggers but not able to edit how the articles are displayed. Need to add some more stylings to drive user engagement etc.
Please advise.
Hi,
Is it possible to configure a condition in the triggers so that an email to and end-user is only sent when anser bot has related articles?
I konw there is a rule {% if answer_bot.article_count > 0 %} for the e-mail body, but at this moment the e-mail is already sent.
We normaly don't sent "request received emails" to our end-users because in our organisation (B TO E) is had no added value.
But when I want to use Answer bot, an email is always sent, even when there are no related answer bot articles.
So what I need is the rule {% if answer_bot.article_count > 0 %} as a condition in the triggers.
Make this sence? Thanks for helping me!
Thomas
Hi Thomas,
Sence that makes! It's something we're tracking and looking to provide in the future - I see you've also added the product feedback for this request (thanks!) I'll update this post with the changes we make to support this in the future.
Hi,
Is there a way to configure the articles that the Bot can show not based on labels but rather based on the section of the articles?
We're a marketplace, so we work with 2 different segments of customers, and we don't want them to receive articles from the wrong segment. I understand that we could apply 1 tag to all tickets inside a section and configure that way, but that would imply going article by article to apply that tag, it would be easier to configure based on the section.
Does anyone know a way to do this, or a workaround for it?
Thanks,
Hi Daniela, using labels provided the most flexibility and coverage for all use cases, although I can see how it would be time consuming to go through and label all your articles accordingly. We did develop a fairly simple developer script to allow bulk updating articles labels within an entire section, which would probably be useful for you: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115011385168-Best-practices-for-developers-Bulk-updating-article-labels-for-Answer-Bot
Thanks for the suggestion Mike, that worked out for us.
I've read today that there's a feature (Guide Bulk Article Actions) being launched that will allow people to do this kind of bulk updates without the help of a developer, this will come in handy!
About the labels, just a question, will this also work for Answer Bot on the Web Form? Meaning, if I switch on Answer Bot on the Web Form, will it also respect this setup with the labels to suggest articles?
Hi Daniela, you can set specific labels using the "configure and test" mode when setting up Answer Bot for Web forms in the Answer Bot settings. Go to Answer Bot settings > Web form (tab), activate Answer Bot for Web Forms, choose the specific forms you wish to activate it for, then hover over the form and you'll see the "Configure and test" link -> Go in there and you'll be able to set the labels for that form and test the experience.
Let us know how that goes?
Hi I am wondering what would be a good percentage of article count to put into our triggers ?
{% if answer_bot.article_count > 0 %}
As we are currently getting a lot of irrelevant articles
Can we adapt this or should this stay zero ?
I have tried changing this to any other number and it seems the trigger is no longer fired afterwards.
Hello Stefan,
Changing the number in the article counter statement will not help with irrelevant articles being suggested. That said, you can improve results by adjusting the irrelevant articles and using article labels. Check out the following article for some pointers: Best Practices: Six steps to success with your Answer Bot
Thanks!
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