When a user submits a support request through a web form on your help center, autoreplies can immediately suggest up to three links to potentially relevant knowledge base articles.
This article discusses the following topics:
Related articles:
Understanding the end user experience
With autoreplies enabled on your web forms, when an end user makes a help request through your help center, they receive a list of suggested articles that may help them self-solve their issue. As soon as they submit their request, an automated pop-up window appears on screen:
In this window, the end user can:
- Preview the article. Expand the article section to view it in the pop-up window.
- Click the article title to view the complete article in your help center in a new tab. See below for more information on this option’s behavior.
- Click No, I need help if the suggested article did not help solve the problem, or click Yes, close my request if they were able to self-solve with the suggested article.
- View any videos embedded in the article.
- Close the pop-up window.
When the end user opens the article, it opens in a new tab, along with a pop-up window allowing them to perform a number of related actions:
While viewing the full article, a modal appears allowing them to perform a number of related actions, including:
- Clicking the support request number to view their help request in a new tab.
- Clicking Yes, close my request to close the help request. If the end user clicks this button, they should not expect to receive any more communication about the request.
- Clicking No to open an optional feedback window, asking for more information about why the article didn't help. If the end user clicks this button, the ticket will be handled as usual.
Activating and configuring autoreplies with articles for web forms
Autoreply with articles placeholders will not send an email
with more suggestions.To enable autoreply with articles in web forms
- In Admin Center, click
Channels in the sidebar, then select Bots and automations > Bots.If you are a legacy Support Suite and standalone Zendesk Support + Guide customers should click
Channels in the sidebar, then select Bots and automations > Article
recommendations and skip to step 3. - Click Manage autoreplies.
- Click the Web form tab.
- Toggle on Web form channel enabled.
This displays an expandable list of your brands and their related webforms.
- Use the toggles to determine which brands, and web forms, will use autoreplies with articles.
Testing autoreplies
You can use labels (as with email and triggers) to segment and refine the overall article suggested in autoreplies, for each brand and form. Read about the best practice for using labels with autoreplies.
To configure and test article labels
- After activating autoreplies with articles for a web form, hover over the form name to display the Configure and test link.
- Click Configure and test to open the testing modal.
- Enter sample subject and description text to view the possible recommended articles for those terms.
17 Comments
Hi Laura,
Apologies for the delayed response here. Are you still having an issue or have you found a resolution?
Hello Nicole, we are still getting this issue.
Hi Laura -
It looks like you don't currently have an active Answer Bot subscription, which is what you'll need to get the pop-up with suggested articles after ticket form submission.
Since it appears you're on our Guide Legacy plan, you should be able to sign up for an Answer Bot trial using the instruction here: Step 1: Start your Answer Bot trial
If you run into any problems, your best bet will be to contact our support team from within your account (Option 1 here): Contacting Zendesk Customer Support
Can you confirm if your Help Center is activated? If not yet, it could be the reason why you are receiving the said error. If the Help Center is already activated and you still encounter an error, you may generate a HAR file and initiate a conversation with us so we can dig deeper.
I hope that helps
Hello Cheeny,
Thanks for your reply, but I deleted this question.
Thanks again, m
Why is it not possible to have Answer Bot give suggestions on BOTH the Web Form and the Email?
We want to make sure that users have access to suggested articles also later, not just when they submit the form. However, we find that users are more likely to click on an article if it is presented when submitting the ticket and that the suggestions via email are often ignored.
Thanks,
Tim
The expected behavior is not showing up in my sandbox, with multiple forms and Web Form Channel Enabled, - there is no pop up window after submission, all I see are the long lists of articles as soon as typing anything in the Subject and Description fields of the form -
Ideally, I would want to suppress the long lists of suggested articles when filling out the form and just use the AI pop up window after submission - less bunden on the end user - if I can get it to work - less distracting than the suggested article lists when filling out the tickets
For such scenarios of a feature not working as expected I believe the best alternative is to troubleshoot further this behavior in a ticket. I can see internally that you already have a ticket opened for the issue you have shared over here and that is under investigation at the moment.
Hello! How can I run a report to see where ticket deflection is occurring from help center visitors clicking on a recommended article and not proceeding with opening a ticket? Thanks in advance!
You can achieve this report by using our recipe: Explore recipe: Answer Bot counts of unassisted solved tickets - However I suggest that you add "Answer Channel" in Rows and filter it for Web Form so you get the data for the tickets created via the Help Center form that was marked Solved after an article recommendation. It will look like this:
Also, I suggest that you take a look at Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Answer Bot in order to understand the definition of each metric and attribute you are going to use in the report. Hope this helps!
This seems to still not be working on my end could l get a more detailed way to set this up?
Heads up that if you are using Answer Bot to send articles via email in addition to having Answer Bot enabled on your web form, email triggers will suppress the article list and inserting the article. I was knocking my head on a wall trying to figure out why our email triggers were blank, only to find this out the hard way.
I have been looking for a way to modify the behaviour of the pop-up that asks "Does this article answer your question?" It covers the content of articles, especially on mobile, asking if the problem is solved before the customer has a chance to read the instructions!
Can the trigger be changed so that it only appears after someone scrolls to the bottom of an article?
Also, it isn't displaying a link to the customer's most recent open ticket as shown in this article, and gives the same message even if they have no ticket open. Can this be changed?
Honestly, I've seen too many people click "yes" and accidentally close their tickets without realizing that this is what they're doing. It would be much more helpful to record their vote but leave the ticket open and let our Customer Care agents confirm that the issue is resolved before closing.
Hello, we are adding internal knowledge base articles to our Help Center, and we are wondering if there's a way to recommend these articles to agents based on the form they are working with.
Appreciate the input.
Have a lovely day
Upon checking currently, the "Does this article answer your question?" self-solving mechanism falls under the Knowledge capture app. At the moment, there is no native way yet to customize or modify this but you can disable this feature as needed. You can follow the steps here: Disabling users from self-solving tickets with linked articles. When disabled, it turns off the self-solve functionality for both Answer Bot for Agents (links suggested by Answer Bot), and Rapid Resolve, (links manually selected by an agent).
Hi Rebeca,
Article recommendation based on ticket form is not yet supported at the moment. When agents work on tickets, article suggestions functionality is through Knowledge in the context panel (using agent workspace) or the Knowledge capture app. These two use search functions when suggesting articles based on the content of the ticket. You can see more about this here to start with: About Knowledge in the context panel and the Knowledge Capture app. However, we encourage you to post that as a feature request here: Feedback - Help Center (Guide) to engage with other users who have similar needs and discuss possible workarounds. Conversations with a high level of engagement ultimately get flagged for product managers to review when they go through roadmap planning.
We hope this information helps and thank you!
Hello,
Is there a report that gives more data about this webform? We have the webform enabled but we need to look at the clickthrough rate and good suggestions vs not relevant suggestions.
Any help would be appreciated.
In this article, Analyzing article recommendations from Answer Bot
To measure the success of the articles you include in your bot answer flows configured with Flow Builder for messaging, you can use the Flow Builder Explore dataset and dashboard to achieve this:
While article suggestion rates are important, it is also important to analyze the rate at which customers who use the Answer bot in messaging channels refer to articles for their difficulties, and the rate at which they are resolved or not. Zendesk recommends that you analyze your FAQ when you run it.
In addition, I encourage you to create a new post in the General Product Feedback topic in our community that will ultimately get flagged for product managers to review when they go through roadmap planning.
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