When used with Zendesk messaging, Answer Bot includes functionality not available through other channels. Flow Builder, a click-to-configure tool allows admins to build custom conversational experiences between customers and Answer Bot, delivered across multiple channels and without writing a single line of code. The addition of Flow Builder allows you to configure how Answer Bot greets your customers, offer quick-reply options and pre-written answers to common questions, provide targeted article recommendations, and more.
This article includes the following topics:
For more information creating conversation flows, see About Flow Builder and Using Flow Builder to automate customer conversations.
Customizing Answer Bot conversation flows
You can build Answer bot customer interaction flows using Flow Builder. Flow Builder is activated automatically, on every active brand, if Zendesk messaging is enabled.
Through Flow Builder, you can add the following steps to your automated conversations:
- Write a message, which displays a piece of text to the end user during a conversation. It can be a welcome message, useful information about your business or a response to a commonly-asked question.
- Transfer to agent, which escalates the conversation to an agent. Answer Bot can also capture information from the end user through ticket fields.
- Suggest articles, where Answer Bot presents up to six Help Center articles to the end user during a conversation.
- Create options, where Answer Bot displays up to six preconfigured quick replies that the end user can interact with during a conversation.
This flow is not static, however. Depending on user actions, a number of default, automated Answer Bot behaviors may be activated at any point in the conversation, including feedback prompts and useful responses to customers’ free-text entries. See The end user experience for more information.
For details on working with Flow Builder, see Using Flow Builder to automate conversations.
The out-of-the-box experience
Flow Builder comes with a simple, working flow for every active brand, so you can begin using Answer Bot through your SDKs without making any updates.
In Flow Builder, the out-of-the-box flow looks like this:
By default, this out-of-the-box flow appears in your account's default Support language, if that language is supported in Answer Bot; otherwise, it appears in English. You can also customize the language is appears in by selecting a flow language.
Default flow for end users
The default flow pictured above translates to an automated conversation in any enabled social messaging or Web SDK channels. For instance, when a customer launches the Web SDK, they’ll see the following:
Here, the customer can select Talk to a human, which triggers the following response, as well as creating a ticket including the conversation history.
Customers are not confined to the automated conversation flow as designed in Flow Builder. There are additional interactions in a conversation between Answer Bot and the customer, as described below in The end user experience.
The end user experience
In this section, we’ll describe and illustrate each element end users may experience during conversations with Answer Bot.
It includes the following topics:
Quick reply options
In conversations, you can offer preconfigured replies that the end user can select from, rather than typing in a response. These options can be used to represent common responses to questions, branch the conversation, or as a way for your end users to navigate through a conversation flow.
In the example below, a customer is contacting a scooter sales and rental company. Because the company knows that most customers want information on buying, selling, or renting a scooter, after the initial greeting they immediately offer three options:
Quick reply options are configured in the Flow Builder.
Note that as a result of conversational shortcuts, typing the message “I want to buy a scooter” in the example above will have the same effect as clicking the quick reply.
Automated direct replies
Automated direct replies are predefined responses to end user free-text messages and quick reply option selection. In the example below, the customer entered “Receiving error ‘unsupported platform’.” which triggered the automated reply following it.
These replies can be added as message steps in the Flow Builder.
Article recommendations through Flow Builder
In addition to the original Answer Bot article suggestion functionality, with Flow Builder you can add an article step to your flow, which allows you to recommend up to six targeted articles at any point in the flow based on customer responses to options. In the image below, the customer selected a quick reply option, "I want to buy a scooter", and received a specific article recommendation in response:
Agent transfer
There may come a time in a conversation when a live agent must be brought in. In the example here, a customer has chosen a quick reply option that indicates they need assistance with upgrading their plan, which requires agent involvement:
This step is configured in Flow Builder, and allows you to request information from the customer (in this case, username and name), and send a customized final message. As part of this step – unseen by the customer – a ticket is created, which includes their conversation history to help the agent address the issue.
Feedback flow
Answer Bot automatically prompts for feedback after it has attempted to provide an answer, such as with an article suggestion or a direct reply.
The feedback flow is automatically enabled and cannot be customized. It is displayed in your selected flow language.
After an article has been suggested, the end user receives the following prompt:
If the end user selects Yes, problem solved, they are shown an automated acknowledgement, and given the option to start the conversation over. If the user selects Start over, the conversation flow starts over from the initial step:

If the end user instead selects No, I still need help, they are shown a different automated acknowledgement and given the options to either start the conversation over, or talk to a human:
If the user clicks Talk to a human, they see a message acknowledging the selection and letting them know they are being transferred to a support agent:
Additionally, a ticket is created, including the full text of the conversation.
Conversational shortcuts and article suggestions
Answer Bot uses AI to assess any free-text message entered into the conversation by a customer and automatically jump to the relevant part of a flow or to an agent escalation. Or, if there isn’t a related response in the existing flow, it will automatically suggest articles from your Help Center that may address the question.
In the following example, Answer Bot offers three options to a customer: I want to buy a scooter, I want to sell a scooter, and I want to rent a scooter. The customer instead wants to track an order they’ve already placed, and enters "track my order" rather than choosing one of the options:
Because the customer entered text that isn’t matched in the flow, Answer Bot offers Help Center articles as possible solutions. The customer can view the suggested article(s), and when asked through the feedback flow, indicate whether they self-solved their question or still need assistance:

For information on how Answer Bot selects articles to suggest, see Optimizing your articles for Answer Bot.
If there are no relevant articles, Answer Bot sends a message offering alternative options to continue the conversation:
12 Comments
It is great to see Zendesk is investing in this field. But in order for us to test it deeper, we need localisation options where default answers (eg. "I didn't get that. Try rephrasing your question....").
I've run into a snag on our support page whereby the status of showing help center articles as an end step has resulted in a number of end users floating in limbo, unidentified, mostly outside of our company's normal operating hours. I would love to have the widget collect contact info before automatically transferring to an agent, or to be able to disable the transfer option after operating hours. Preferably both!
Hey Ali Demir
Shiyu from the Zendesk product team. When you speak of localisation, are you referring to localizing the entire flow or only certain messages inside a flow. Thanks
Hey Ramon Zelaya
Have you tried adding a transfer to agent step after article suggestions as a way to prevent end-users floating in limbo?
Thanks for your feedback around business operating hours, I have captured your use case for us to consider in the future.
Shiyu Zhu
Thank you for reaching out. Some default texts are English-Only (also cannot be changed in English) so these should be localized in other languages. The page itself is ok to be in English.
Regards,
Shiyu Zhu
Hi Shiya, Referring to your message here -
I am unable to configure another step after Articles suggestion, in order to transfer to an agent.
The transfer to agent step will be helpful after Articles suggestion, then I can add the form to collect ticket fields information from the end-users.
Instead of relying on the "Talk to Human" end of loop from Answer Bot which doesn't ask with the form.
Is there any reporting available around what inquiries didn't resolve the issue for the customer when using AnswerBot? We'd like to be able to capture this information so we can add it to our Help Center articles.
Hey Dave,
We released Improved reporting for answer-bot in Explore which you can find out more in the link I attached. It looks like we include a rejection rate for articles that did not resolve the issue for the user.
Let me know if that's not what you're looking for!
Thanks Brett, although clicking on your link takes me here. I tried searching as well but came up empty.
Hey Dave,
Looks like the announcement has since been archived. You can find out more about answer bot reporting here: Explore recipe: Analyzing Answer Bot activity
You can also find out more about our answer bot metrics and attributes here: Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Guide
I hope this helps!
Is there a way to change the name of the answerbot to something else?
Hey Jordan,
It doesn't look like this is possible at this time, however, our Product Managers are looking to have this functionality available in the future.
Let us know if you have any other questions!
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