Answer Bot uses machine learning to answer customer questions with content from your knowledge base. To use Answer Bot, you must have Guide Professional or Enterprise, plus the Answer Bot add-on.
Documentation
Administrator
- Quickstart guide: Answer Bot
- Understanding everywhere you can use Answer Bot
- Using Answer Bot in your email notifications
- Using Answer Bot with your web forms
- Viewing and managing your Answer Bot settings
- Creating and managing triggers for Answer Bot
- Configuring Answer Bot for the Web Widget
- Enabling and using Answer Bot in the Web Widget
- Using the Answer Bot for Slack integration
- Using labels to influence Answer Bot results
- Disabling Answer Bot
- Analyzing your Answer Bot activity
Developer
Best practices for admins
- Best practices: Preparing to use Answer Bot
- Best practices: Using labels with Answer Bot
- Best practices: Answer Bot customer service for agents
- Best practices: Setting up Answer Bot triggers, views, and workflows
- Best practices: Helping Answer Bot find the right articles more easily
- Optimizing your articles for Answer Bot
- Improving your Answer Bot click-through rate
- Improving your Answer Bot activation rate
- Improving your Answer Bot suggest rate
- Boosting your Answer Bot click-through rate with conditional email text
107 Comments
Hey David,
Not a dumb question! You are correct in that this only works for a KB in Zendesk. Presently, we don't have any plans for integrations with external Help Centers, but keep an eye out as things are constantly changing around here!
Thanks Leah!
I am guessing this needs tickets to run?
I find the feature pretty interesting as the search algorithm does not always help our visitors get the best results out of the KnowledgeBase, but we are not using the ticketing system.
Hey Mike!
Long-time reader, first time commenter... ;)
Is there a way to explicitly remove a public article from those the answer bot will consider? I've got a couple different versions of an article that will be linked from our product depending on the circumstance as a part of an n-way experiment, and I really don't want the conflicting versions to be served up via automatic answers.
Hope all is well!
eb
HI Joanna, the main benefit of this feature is definitely aligned with Support and helping end-users who send in questions get their answers more quickly and easily - you do need Support (tickets) to make use of this.
Hi,
My insights dashboard is showing a deflection tab now, but I don't have answer bot access to set it up. Is there a reason for this? Am i missing something?
Hi Mike, I see the Early Access Program is closed for new applicants. When will this feature be available? Is there any chance to be added?
Hey Mike -- we've been running Answer But for over a week now, but no Deflections tab in insights!
Hey Cam, I've just jumped in to take a look - head to Insights, open the "Insights - View only" default dashboard, then you should see a "Deflection" tab at the end. Happy to connect direct if needed to walk through the reporting, just let me know ;)
We would like to have it in Spanish. :-(
If a customer solves their own ticket using Answer Bot, I don't want to send them a satisfaction survey. How could I exclude these tickets from our satisfaction survey automation?
If you're adding a tag to tickets solved by Answer Bot, you could add a condition to your satisfaction survey trigger to check whether that tag is present. If the tag is there, don't send the survey.
@Jennifer thanks for the tip. Do you know what condition(s) I can use to tag tickets solved by Answer Bot?
@Mikayla, this is how we (and I assume Jennifer) do it.
Add a set of labels to whichever trigger sends your answerbot emails. For example, "answerbot_attempted" and "solved_by_answerbot"
Then, assuming that any case where answerbot ran but an agent replied means the case wasn't solved by answerbot, we use this trigger to strip the "solved_by_answerbot" tag:

This means the cases that keep that tag were actually solved, and in your CSAT survey Automation you can add "solved_by_anwerbot" as an exception with:
"Ticket: Tags -- Contains none of the following"
Thanks I'll give that a try!
Hey Mike
Any estimation when this feature will be multilingual? We are all set, we are operating in 4 different languages (Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish and English) but only English works for now. However we are looking forward for other languages to work as well.
Any update on when this will be available to those who didn't make the early access cut off?
Hey Josh, you've got mail ;)
@Mike Mortimer - I saw that! Thank you for adding me! I'll start playing around with it ASAP.
Sorry if I missed this in the above chain, but has anyone found a way to stop the automation from sending if the Agent created the ticket on the End User's behalf? EX: I need to proactively reach out to a customer via email. I create a new ticket setting the customer as the requester and email them = Answer Bot should NOT suggest solutions? Thank you in advance!
Hi Leigh, this one was answered in the beta community group - https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115000764928-Stopping-Agent-Created-tickets-from-triggering-AA - let us know how you go and if you have any follow-up questions.
Any chance I can sneak into this beta even though it is officially closed?
I'd also like to know when this is going live, if you guys have an idea of a release date. We're evaluating some other support AI services but always prefer to keep everything under the same roof whenever possible. Since we're using both Zendesk Support and Guide extensively, it seems like Answer Bot would be a great solution for us. Thanks!
Hi Mike,
I'm seeing the prompt to buy now, but I'm not seeing any links that'll go over the pricing, etc. Will that be coming soon? Thanks!
Craig - Answer Bot will be available soon, so we aren't adding anyone else to the Beta at the moment. Stay tuned and we'll let you know once it's live! It won't be long.
Lance - Coming very soon - stay tuned!
Leif - I'm not sure why that info isn't available, but I'd guess it'll come out once Answer Bot has been more broadly rolled out.
Leif, if you're the account owner you can see the pricing when you go through to manage your subscription - head to admin > subscription > manage (or hit the buy now button). Answer Bot should be available as an add-on option to Guide and you'll be able to manipulate the slider to select a monthly usage limit.
Craig and Lance - as Nicole mentioned, stay tuned for the public launch happening very soon! :)
I am using the Essential Plan. Can I test the Bot as well? I can only see the "Request Access" button under Admin > Business Rules > Answer Bot.
It would be great if we could have a tag that would tell AnswerBot not to include this article ever. We have some articles that are public, but are not ones that we would send to answer questions. For instance we have articles on how we hire, benefits etc.
thanks,
Shannon
Hi Shannon,
Answer Bot adheres to the permissions set on the articles for each request. Only articles that the requester has access to will ever be sent. So your internal articles are safe :)
@Mike, I get the same as Hugo. I can only see the "Request Access" button under Admin > Business Rules > Answer Bot. I'd like to enable and test it. Am I missing something? Sean.
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