When enabled and configured for email notifications, Answer Bot responds to support tickets by sending an automated email that lists potentially relevant knowledge base articles. This encourages self-service in your customer base, and raises awareness of your knowledge base offerings. It analyzes titles, text, and labels to select the best articles in your Help Center.
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Understanding the end user experience
When you're using Answer bot in email notifications, the end user receives an automated email response to their support request. The email looks like a standard auto-response, with a list of suggested articles and other information provided by the placeholders used in the Answer Bot trigger.
From here, the end user can perform a number of actions, including:
- Clicking any of the suggested article links. This opens the Help Center article in a new tab. From there, the user can read the article, click to see to their help request, and indicate whether it helped them answer their question:
- Clicking the request number opens the request in a new tab.
- Clicking Yes, close my request opens the article in the Help Center, and closes the help request.
- Clicking No opens an optional feedback window, asking for more information about why the article didn't help.
- Reading the top suggested article. The entire article is included in the email.
- Clicking the Yes, close my request button, for any of the suggested articles. This opens the article in the Help Center, and closes the help request.
- Clicking No beneath the top suggested article opens an optional feedback window, asking for more information about why the article didn't help.
end users can return to the email and access the links as often as necessary.
Enabling and configuring Answer bot for email notifications
Enabling Answer Bot is simply a matter of toggling it on in Zendesk Support. Once enabled, you'll need to configure your triggers. See Creating and managing triggers for Answer Bot.
To enable Answer Bot
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Business Rules > Answer Bot.
- Click the Try Answer Bot for 30 days to activate your 30-day unlimited trial.
When the Answer Bot page opens, follow the onboarding tool tips, along with the information in this article, to get Answer Bot up and running.
Once this is done, the Answer Bot admin page updates to display data for viewing and managing your Answer Bot settings. You can configure your triggers and enable Answer Bot for web forms.
Testing email notification results
You can test how your Answer Bot results would work on your existing Support tickets, as soon as you complete an Answer Bot trigger.
For information on working with triggers for Answer bot, see Creating and managing triggers for Answer Bot.
To test Answer Bot results
- Create a new Answer Bot-related trigger, or open an existing trigger already configured for Answer Bot.
- At the bottom of the Actions section on the trigger's edit page, click the Configure and test button.
- In the testing modal, titled Configure article labels and test Answer Bot, fill out the following information:
- List of article labels to be included by Answer Bot for this trigger: 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.
- 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.
- Click Show suggested answers, at the bottom of the modal, to display a list of articles your user might receive in an email notification, for a ticket with the labels and ticket information applied.
- If the results are acceptable, click Apply labels, which saves trigger. If the results are not acceptable, edit the entries and try again, or click Cancel.
6 Comments
Hello Aimee Spanier
What happens if we do not allow customers to see their request in Zendesk platform? My question is directly related to "Clicking the request number opens the request in a new tab."
Hi Kevin,
How are you restricting end user access to their tickets? In general whenever someone clicks a link that they don't have access to they'll get an error page. It isn't possible to customize the pop up, so the link will be offered to customers as part of the formatting.
Hi Gail,
Thank you for your reply.
We're restricting access to tickets at the moment and I was wondering if we could give people access to that but not to the community part of Zendesk.
Hi Kevin,
You are definitely not required to have the community enabled if your team isn't using it. We've got a guide to the settings in our article on Gather community settings that shows where the toggle is, as long it's off the community will not be offered to customers (you will still see the feature option in the Guide Admin settings, but the end users do not see it on the site unless it's enabled).
I'm not sure if this is mentioned anywhere, but what's the best practice for not sending the default auto-acknowledgment trigger we send for every new ticket? I don't want customers to receive two auto-responses and prefer to send just one.
By default Allen, customers will only receive one notification that the ticket has been received. You can customise the trigger to "mute" notifications dependent on the channel, customer, organisation etc.
If you want the answer bot to insert suggestions into the initial auto-response then you can do this with a trigger by adding the following into the email body under the actions for the initial response trigger:
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