Figuring out the best way to set up Answer Bot triggers, automations, views, and tags can be confusing for a lot of users. In this article, we're offering some recommendations for the following situations:
- Automatic tags
- Basic tagging
- Tagging solved tickets
- Removing the tags from reopened Answer Bot tickets
- Following up with customers who self-solve
- Creating an Answer Bot trigger for follow-up tickets
- Suppressing Customer Satisfaction surveys on Answer Bot tickets
Automatic tags
There are four tags that Answer Bot automatically adds to tickets to simplify setting up of new triggers and automation. Use the below table to understand what these tags are and when they are added.
Ticket tag name |
When is it added? |
Ab_suggest_false |
Added when Answer Bot is successfully triggered but failed to find any matching articles |
ab_suggest_true |
Added when Answer Bot successfully made an article suggestion |
ab_marked_unhelpful |
Added when the end user indicated that the suggestion was unhelpful |
ab_resolved |
Added when the end user marks the suggestion as helpful. |
Please note that if you are using the answer_bot_fired tag, your existing triggers will continue to work as it does today.
Basic tagging
Basic tagging is important for almost all configurations and best practices for Answer Bot. To allow us to optimise how triggers are fired, set up new triggers to take new actions, or change automations, we have to start with some basic tag manipulation:
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Business Rules > Answer Bot.
- For every trigger listed in the Answer Bot trigger section, select Edit.
- Scroll down to the bottom of the trigger, to the Actions section and select Add Action.
- Select Add tags from the drop-down list and then insert the tag answer_bot_fired.
- Save the trigger.
Now all tickets Answer Bot has fired on will have the answer_bot_fired tag and we can easily create a view to see them:
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Manage > Views.
- Create a new view - call it Answer Bot Tickets
- Set the conditions:
- Ticket Status | Less than | Closed
- Ticket Tags | Contains at least one of the following | answer_bot_fired
Tagging solved tickets
In this step, you'll create a trigger that determines whether an end user has resolved their ticket based on an Answer Bot suggestion, and tags the ticket as solved by Answer Bot.
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Business Rules > Triggers.
- Create a new trigger - call it Answer Bot: Tag as solved
- Set the following Conditions:
- Ticket | Is | Updated
- Requester Role | Is | (end user)
- Current user | Is | (end user)
- Ticket Status | Changed to | Solved
- Ticket Channel | Is | Email
- Ticket Tags | Contains at least one of the following | ab_resolved
- Add the following Actions:
- Select Add tags from the drop-down list and then insert the tag answer_bot_solved.
- Save the trigger.
Now all tickets Answer Bot has solved will also have the answer_bot_solved tag, and we can easily create a view to see those as well:
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Manage > Views.
- Create a new view - call it Answer Bot Solved Tickets
- Set the conditions:
- Ticket Status | Greater than | On-hold (or Pending, if on-hold status is not available for your account)
- Ticket Tags | Contains at least one of the following | answer_bot_solved
You should examine your ticketing workflows and make adjustments to the suggested trigger configuration to take into account non-standard ticketing workflows. For instance, if you have agents self-assigning and solving tickets without adding a public comment, the tag answer_bot_solved would be added, even though the ticket was not solved by Answer Bot. Adjusting the workflow, or adding conditions to the trigger to specify a ticket assignee, for example, can help avoid these conflicts.
Removing tags from reopened Answer Bot tickets
You could even take this one step further and add another trigger to remove the answer_bot_solved tag, if a ticket is reopened:
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Business Rules > Triggers.
- Create a new trigger - call it Answer Bot: Tag as Reopened
- Set the conditions:
- Ticket Status: is less than Solved
- Agent replies greater than 0
- Ticket tags: contain answer_bot_solved
- Add the following Actions:
- Select Add tags from the drop-down list and then insert the tag answer_bot_reopen.
- Select Remove tags from the drop-down list and then insert the tag answer_bot_solved - this will remove that tag
- Save the trigger.
Following up when customers self-solve
Extending on the previous steps, you can also add another action to send the requester a follow-up email to confirm that their request has been marked as solved.
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Business Rules > Triggers.
- Create the trigger in the previous step, or edit the Answer Bot: Tag as solved trigger
- Add a new action:
- Email > Requester
- Enter an email subject and body
- Save the trigger.
The final trigger should look like this:
Creating an Answer Bot trigger for follow-up tickets
In some situations, you may want to check in on a closed ticket. Closed tickets cannot be reopened, so to continue the conversation (rather than starting a new one) you need to create a follow-up ticket.
When you create a follow-up ticket, all of the closed ticket's information, including tags, is carried over into the new ticket. That means that the answer_bot_solved tag is applied to the follow-up ticket, which prevents Answer Bot from firing on the new ticket. This is fine if you do not need Answer Bot to work on the new ticket; however, if you want to include Answer Bot suggestions in the ticket notifications, you'll need to remove the answer_bot_solved tag.
To create a trigger removing the answer_bot_solved tag from a follow-up ticket
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Business Rules > Triggers.
- Create a new trigger - call it Answer Bot: Follow_up
- Set the conditions:
- Ticket is: Created
- Channel is: Closed ticket
- Ticket tags: contain answer_bot_solved
- Add the following Actions:
- Remove tags: answer_bot_solved
- Save the trigger.
Suppressing Customer Satisfaction surveys on Answer Bot tickets
Customer Satisfaction surveys were designed primarily for when human agents have been involved in solving the ticket. Many customers choose to disable satisfaction surveys for Answer Bot tickets. This step assumes that you have tagged tickets solved by Answer Bot with the answer_bot_solved tag.
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Business Rules > Automations.
- Open the automation that's been set up to send Satisfaction surveys, by default it's calledRequest customer satisfaction rating (System Automation).
- Add a new condition:
- Ticket tags: contains none of the following: answer_bot_solved
- Save the automation.
30 Comments
Suggestion: When setting up the trigger to tag tickets as solved by answer bot, you suggested:
However, if your agent needs to check with an internal stakeholder and places the ticket as On-Hold, before sending a response to the customer, the customer will receive an email saying "Glad you found your answer with our self service articles!"
I instead set it up like this:
Ticket Status: is changed to Solved
Agent replies=0
The answer_bot_solved trigger is fired when an Agent solves a ticket without a public comment too.
Hi there! I have set up the follow-up for self-solve successfully, but for some reason, I keep getting the email responses from users when they reopen the tickets as assigned to me.
I noticed the tickets solved with AB get assigned to me automatically after successful user interactions. How can we avoid these tickets from getting assigned to agents? I would rather have these reopened tickets back in the queue and not in the admin Open queue.
Any ideas? Am I doing something wrong or missing a step somewhere?
Thanks~
I had initially set the answer_bot_fired tag to be added on the trigger as specified above, but it seemed to add to all tickets and not just the ones where Answer Bot actually suggested articles. I read the Liquid Mark-up documentation and it does not appear to allow the capability to set a field value, like a tag. I am now trying to create a second trigger to set the answer_bot_fired tag based on ticket comments - we will see. Does anyone have a better idea?
I find this is marking cases as answer_bot_solved when the client marks the case as Solved prior to us making the first response (they figured out their answer, but not bc of Answer bot). I'm having to manually remove tags and it's becoming daunting to manage.
As Jamie Noell noticed, the trigger will put a tag "answer_bot_fired" even if AnBot is actually not fired.
I need a way to tag tickets with a tag only in a case when a user receives an email with listed articles (user gets one or more articles, that should mean AnBot is fired). :/
This also wouldn't work for Answerbot within the web form or widget. Shouldn't Zendesk tag "answer bot fired" automatically?!
I tested the function.
1. Close a ticket and confirmed it is resolved by answer bot
2. I received the message - ticket is solved, if it was incorrectly closed, please reply and we will re-open the ticket.
I checked ZD, the ticket is not re-opened. Please advise if I am doing anything wrong here
Hemlata, you might need to reach out to support to help review your triggers / automations to make sure they are setup properly to allow a ticket to be re-opened when a user replies. I've created a ticket on your behalf to get someone to help review it with you
Howdy! How can we assure 'answer_bot_solved' tag is NOT added when an agent closes the ticket?
The recommended trigger above suggests using 'Agent replies = 0' as a rule, however, that is often the case when we are closing up spam, or other various types of inquiries we get which receive no reply before moving to Solved.
Any ideas? I've tried to look at various rule options to no avail...
Hi TJ, I might request this best practice to be updated. I think the following setup might better cover all these cases, but I'm keen to get everyone's thoughts to see if there are any cases it's missing:
Role is end user. Ensures that the end user themselves is self-solving the ticket
Status is changed to "Solved". I.e. they are solving their own ticket
Tags contains "answer_bot_fired" ensures this only runs on tickets where Answer Bot actually fired
Agent replies is 0 ensures that agents have not been involved. This condition is probably optional.
Let me know what you think and if this is a better recipe to use for best practice moving forward?
Hi Mike,
That looks indeed like it would probably solve this for us! Thank you for pointing it out! I'll make the adjustment and see how it goes.
Cheers!
No worries, look forward to hearing if it worked as expected.
Hey Mike, I finally got around to testing this after seeing a recently agent solved inquiry land in our folder for 'answer_bot_solved' tickets.
Seems the role rule is maybe not applying (guessing). I shouldn't think it would matter if it were at the top of the rules, or bottom, but does it? I added the role to the trigger and so it's at the bottom of the requirements ...
Hi! I have the same question as Jamie Noell and Vladan Jovic. How do we make it so that the 'answer_bot_fired' tag ONLY gets added to tickets where an email was fired off with a list of suggested articles? Right now, it gets added to all tickets regardless of whether there were suggested articles or not.
It's a bit strange that there are no conditions for answerbot itself. Thanks @mike for the role idea. Have to test a bit but the first tests worked so far.
I still search a reliable way to find out how many and which tickets were solved by answer bot actually. At least it costs 1€ for each solution. I guess chances are that it will get clicked even though answer bot didn't help. So I would like to see the real performance instead those guesstimates in admin area.
I was told it can be solved with insights. Anyone created a report already that lists all tickets that really should have been solved by answer bot? I would like to check those tickets out then.
@Mike - I modified your suggestion and got it to work correctly:
Glad to hear you got it working, Brad! Thanks for letting us know.
I have the same question as others here. How do we only apply the answer_bot_fired tag to tickets where AB actually suggested articles? Additionally, where is the functionality to train the bot over time (right now we can say "no, this article shouldn't have been suggested" but we can't say "instead of that, you should have suggested this article").
Great question, Justin
There's no button that you can click or condition that can be set for 'no articles suggested'. Also, since the liquid conditional statements in the answerbot triggers like {% if answer_bot.article_count > 0 %} will only alter the message sent to the end user it will not be actionable in a trigger.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news here but unless there is a workaround I am not seeing there is no clean way of removing that tag from articles where the trigger fired, but did not suggest an answer.
As for improving answers beyond flagging 'No this article shouldn't have been suggested' we recommend the following six steps: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004478267
I've just updated my re-opened tickets trigger with the condition (re-opens = less than 1) and was wondering if this will remove the tag retrospectively for all tickets in that view or just the new ones? i'm still replies to previous tickets in my answer bot view even though answer bot was not fired.
Hi Nodreen!
The changed trigger will only run on tickets that are updated, which means that any tickets created prior to the change would need to be updated manually in order for the changed trigger to run on them.
Thanks Jessie
How can I make it so that the "answer_bot_solved" tag gets added only when the user actually resolves the ticket by clicking on one of the articles suggested by Answer Bot? Right now, it gets added even when the user simply closes the ticket without doing anything. I've tried setting up the solved trigger to look for keywords in the comment to see if that would do it, but without any luck. When setup this way, the tag doesn't get added even when it's a legit resolution by Answer Bot - I don't know why.
Anyone got any ideas? I've run out of ideas at this point! Thanks for any help you can offer.
Hey Nivedita!
My apologies, the event in which Answer Bot tickets are marked as solved by customers is not actionable via Business Rules such as Triggers and Automations since there is not actually a comment being added to the ticket. The reason these best practices recommendations are provided as they are is because these are the methods you'll need to use at this time if you wish to best identify the tickets in which Answer Bot has offered suggestions to and/or solved the ticket your customer had submitted.
"Right now, it gets added even when the user simply closes the ticket without doing anything."
It's not possible for an end-user to close a ticket without doing anything. It sounds like you may wish to check the Ticket Events when you're seeing this happen as it sounds like your Agents are assigning these tickets to themselves and solving them without replying to your customer. The best practices Triggers are built with the expectation that your Agents will reply to your customers on tickets instead of solving them without replying so if that is not the case you may need to adjust or refine your Trigger conditions to align with your Agents' workflows. Alternatively you may wish to have a conversation with your Agents who are solving these tickets without replying and ask them not to handle customer requests in that manner.
Thanks, James! That clarifications really helps. I didn't realize that the 'mark as solved' button appears for end-users only when the ticket is assigned to an agent - so that's one less thing to worry about!
Thanks again! :)
Wow, this is an amazing article! Thanks!
Aren't the answer_bot_solved and answer_bot_fired redundant with these new "ab_" tags in place ?
I don't see why we should be adding them with the triggers but maybe I'm missing something.
Thanks !
Hello Traian Vila
The automatic tags, such as ab_suggest_true or ab_resolved only tell you whether an Answer Bot suggestion was offered and if the customer marked it as unhelpful or resolved.
These additional tags that are added with the triggers in this article help you get into tracking and reacting to more nuanced situations such as when a customer marks a ticket as "resolved" by an Answer Bot suggestion, but then ends up following up and reopening the ticket with another question anyway. These additional tags just help you get into more nuance, they aren't necessarily a replacement for the automatic tags, as much as they are building off of the automatic tags to broaden what you're able to know about your customers' interaction with Answer Bot.
I hope that helps! Let me know if you have further questions on that!
This set of conditions for tagging tickets as solved doesn't work for me:
Reason being that ticket events states that Zendesk adds ab_resolved in a separate action to the user changing ticket status to solved. Further to this, when Zendesk adds the tag rather than the user, it doesn't always count as a ticket update for some reason so it's impossible to build a trigger around the ab_resolved tag: a vast majority of the time it just won't fire until the ticket updates on close. I wish that this whole feature were baked in rather than organised via triggers. It's so inconsistent.
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