Quickstart guide: Autoreplies

Fastpath: Admin Center > Channels > Bots and automations > Article recommendations

Attention: Zendesk has renamed our bot capabilities. Answer Bot is now Zendesk bots, Flow Builder is bot builder, and Article Recommendations are autoreplies. For more information on this change, see this announcement. For customers on legacy Support Suite plans, or the standalone Zendesk Support + Guide package, autoreplies with articles are called Article Recommendations.

This quickstart guide is written to help you get a standard autoreply configuration up and running with your existing help center content.

Standard autoreplies, also called autoreplies with articles, are included with all Zendesk Suite plans and are available as an add-on for Zendesk Support + Guide users. To get the most out of standard autoreplies your help center should have at least 10 articles that cover commonly-asked questions.

This article contains the following steps:

• Step 1: Activate Answer Bot (legacy Support Suite and Support + Guide plans only)
• Step 2: Evaluate your current help center content
• Step 3: Activate autoreplies
• Step 4: Assess performance

Step 1 : Activate Answer Bot (legacy Support Suite and Support + Guide plans only)

If you're using Support + Guide, or are on a legacy Support Suite plan, you need to sign up for the 30-day trial to start using Answer Bot. If you’ve already done this, skip ahead to Step 2.

To activate Answer Bot

1. In Admin Center, click Channels in the sidebar, then select Bots and automations > Article recommendations.
2. Click Try Answer Bot for 30 days to activate your 30-day unlimited trial.

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 autoreplies 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: The first 75 words of an article are weighed most heavily when being assessed, 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 results.

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

Related articles:

• Creating and editing articles in the knowledge base
• Optimizing your articles for autoreplies
• Understanding Content Cues

Step 3: Activate autoreplies

Next, you can activate autoreplies with articles or Article Recommendations. 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 autoreplies or Article Recommendations through email notifications or web forms, in the Web Widget (Classic) or the mobile Support app, as part of a Zendesk messaging conversation bot, and in conjunction with the Slack integration with Zendesk. For information on your options for using autoreplies across Zendesk, see Understanding everywhere you can use Zendesk bots.

Related articles:

• Enabling and configuring autoreplies for email notifications
• Enabling and configuring autoreplies for web forms
• Using the Answer Bot for Slack integration
• Searching and linking articles using the Knowledge Capture app
• Enabling and using Answer Bot in Web Widget (Classic)
• Answer Bot API

Step 4: Assess performance

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

Creating views for autoreply tickets

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

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

• Tickets autoreplies has fired on
• Tickets autoreplies has helped customers self-solve
• Tickets autoreplies has fired on but not solved

Related article:

• Best practices: Setting up triggers, views, and workflows

Using Explore

Autoreplies have a dedicated dashboard in Explore, labeled Answer Bot, that monitors metrics for the feature's two main usage types:

• Article Recommendations (for email, web forms, and live chat). Key metrics include Suggestion rate, Click-through rate, Resolution rate, and Rejection rate.
• Flow Builder (for messaging). Key metrics include Total users, Engaged with bot, and Transferred to agent.

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

Related articles:

• Overview of the Zendesk Answer Bot dashboard