Quickstart guide: Answer Bot

answer bot add on

This Quickstart guide is written to help new Answer Bot users get a simple Answer Bot configuration up and running with their existing Help Center content.

To get the most out of Answer Bot:

Your Help Center should have at least 10 articles that cover commonly-asked questions.
You should be using Guide Professional or higher.

This article contains the following steps:

Step 1: Start your Answer Bot trial
Step 2: Evaluate your current Help Center content
Step 3: Enable Answer Bot
Step 4: Assess Answer Bot performance

Step 1: Start your Answer Bot trial

To start using Answer Bot, you need to sign up for the 30-day trial. If you’ve already done this, skip ahead to Step 2.

To sign up for Answer Bot

In Zendesk Support, 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.

At any time during the 30-day period, you can purchase the Answer Bot add-on.

Step 2: Evaluate your current Help Center content

Take a look at the content offered in your Help Center. You can optimize your articles for Answer Bot with some small changes.

In particular, look at the following article elements:

Titles: Try to title your articles using language and phrasing your customer might use in a search, or in a ticket description. Simple questions ("How do I reset my password?") or phrases ("Resetting a password") are a good approach.
Introductions: Answer Bot weighs the first 75 words of an article most heavily, so getting relevant keywords in your introduction is key. Try to start your articles with clear, focused paragraphs.
Topics: Create bite-sized articles that address single, narrowly-focused topics, rather than long articles with multiple separate, if related, sections. For example, instead of writing one article including all profile-related settings, break that information up into separate articles for each setting. You can connect these smaller articles together using a related articles list, or collect them in a resource article containing links to all profile-related articles.

If you are using Content Cues, you can leverage the suggested articles feedback to improve your Answer Bot results.

Keep in mind that these are just suggestions for building a Help Center that will work with Answer Bot. You can apply any, all, or none of them to your Help Center content at any time during the trial.

Step 3: Enable Answer Bot

Next, you can enable Answer Bot throughout Zendesk. Where you add it depends entirely on your Zendesk products and integrations, and where you think it will best fit into your setup. You can use it to offer article suggestions through email notifications or web forms, in the Web Widget or the mobile Support app, in conjunction with the Slack integration with Zendesk, and more. For information on your options for using Answer Bot across Zendesk, see Understanding everywhere you can use Answer Bot.

Related articles:

Step 4: Assess Answer Bot performance

With a few simple configurations, you can evaluate how Answer Bot impacts your customer interactions Creating ticket views, as well as using your Insights or Explore dashboards, can help you decide if Answer Bot is the right tool for you.

Creating views for Answer Bot tickets

You can create views for tickets affected by Answer Bot, to easily see how your end users are interacting with Answer Bot, and to assess whether it is working for you.

You’ll want to use triggers and tags to identify Answer Bot tickets and sort them into Answer Bot-only views. Your basic Answer Bot views can include (but are not limited to):

Tickets Answer Bot has fired on
Tickets Answer Bot has helped customers self-solve
Tickets Answer Bot has fired on but not solved

Best practices: Setting up Answer Bot triggers, views, and workflows

Using Explore or Insights

Answer Bot has dedicated dashboards in both Explore and Insights that monitor a number of related metrics, including ticket volume, article performance, and Answer Bot performance by time and channel.

Answer Bot begins gathering usage data immediately upon implementation. You can begin monitoring performance through your Explore or Insights dashboard right away, or wait until more information is available. Commonly, users check data after 24 hours, 48 hours, 1 week, and three weeks to see how Answer Bot performance changes over time.

Answer Bot’s metrics are tracked on the Guide - Explore dashboard. A few key metrics to look at include:

Resolution rate: The percentage of answers resolved through Answer Bot from the total answers offered.
Resolutions: The number of resolutions provided by Answer Bot.
Resolution time median: The median time from Answer Bot offering an answer, to the request being resolved by the end-user.
Click-through rate: The percentage of Answer Bot answers clicked by an end-user.
Click time median: The median time from Answer Bot offering an answer to the user clicking on that answer.