What are my chatbot options with Zendesk?

Question

My company is pursuing a chatbot solution. How can we do that using Zendesk?

Answer

Depending on the level of complexity you need and the resources available to you, there are multiple options.

Build your own

By using the Chat Conversations API you are able to create your own chatbot. Using this API essentially allows your application to act as an agent chatting with your customers.

This option can be developer-intensive. For more information, see this article: Getting started with the Chat Conversations API.

Answer Bot

Answer Bot is Zendesk's own chatbot product. At its most basic, Answer Bot uses machine learning to search your knowledge base to find articles that match your customer's question. For more information on Answer Bot, see the following articles:

• Understanding everywhere you can use Zendesk bots
• Enabling Article Recommendations in the Web Widget (Classic)

If you enable Zendesk Messaging on your account, you will have access to a much more customizable experience. Messaging bots can mimic real conversations and create a more natural support experience. 

You can build these conversations in a tool called conversation bot. Using conversation bot, you start by creating a messaging bot to interact with your customers. You can create multiple unique bots for different brands, languages, locales, and departments. Once you have your bots built, you populate them with Answers. Each Answer addresses one particular customer question or issue, also known as an intent. Over time, you train your bot so it gets better at answering customer questions. If you don't have an Answer already configured, then Answer Bot simply falls back on the article recommendations search described above. 

Sunshine Conversations

You can use Sunshine Conversation APIs to connect bots over messaging. See these articles for more information: 

• Sunshine Conversations Overview
• SunCo Chatbots

Third-party solution

You are also able to integrate third-party AI software with Zendesk for your chatbot needs. It is important to consider that Zendesk Customer Support is not able to directly assist with this implementation, as our ability to answer questions about third-party software is limited.