Configuring email autoreplies to deflect requests

Attention: Zendesk has renamed our bot capabilities. Answer Bot is now Zendesk bots, Flow Builder is bot builder, and Article Recommendations are autoreplies. Some older features still use the old terminology, which is reflected in the documentation. For more information on this change, see this announcement.

An autoreply is an automated response to a customer’s request, sent through an email or web form. You can create email autoreplies using triggers, which determine when the reply is sent and what information is included in the email response.

Zendesk supports two trigger actions for email autoreplies:

• Autoreply with articles: This action includes suggested help center articles in the email response to help the customer resolve their issue.
• Autoreply: This option attempts to directly answer the customer’s request in the email response. The autoreply is typically triggered based on AI predictions about intent, language, and sentiment. These are called advanced autoreplies, and are available as part of the Advanced AI add-on.

Note: You must activate autoreplies before you can create autoreply triggers.

This article discusses the following topics:

• Requirements for email autoreplies
• Configuring an email autoreply with article suggestions
• Converting a default trigger to an email autoreply with article suggestions
• Configuring an advanced email autoreply
• Accessing email autoreplies

Requirements for email autoreplies

To use the Autoreply with articles action, you must activate your help center. For more information, see Getting started with Guide for your help center: Setting up.

To use the Autoreply action, you must have the Zendesk Advanced AI add-on and have intelligence triage enabled. For more information, see Introduction to Zendesk Advanced AI and Turning on and configuring intelligent triage.

Configuring an email autoreply with article suggestions

To set up an email autoreply with article suggestions, create a new trigger or update an existing one to use the Autoreply with articles action.

Before you start, make sure you're familiar with triggers. For more information on triggers, see Creating triggers for automatic ticket updates and notifications and Managing triggers.

To configure an email autoreply with articles trigger

1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Triggers.
   • To create a trigger, click Create trigger.
   • To edit a trigger, click the title of the trigger you want to edit.
2. Configure the trigger conditions. For example, you may want to send an autoreply email with suggested articles to an end user as soon as they submit a help request, but only from a mobile device. That trigger would include the following conditions:
   • Ticket | Is | Created

     AND

   • Requester: Role | Is | (end user)

     AND

   • Ticket: Channel | Is | Mobile
3. Next, configure the trigger to perform the following action:
   • Autoreply with articles | (requester)

     This establishes that all tickets that meet the above conditions will send your autoreply email (see below) to the ticket requester.

4. When you select Autoreply with articles from the Actions drop-down, the autoreply email field appears:

   

5. Fill out the subject and body text you want to include in the autoreply email. Use the following placeholders to customize the email text. You can also click View available placeholders to view and copy placeholder text:
   • {{autoreply.article_count}}

     Required. You must include this placeholder for the feature to work. This placeholder adds a list of up to three articles that best match the request, links to those articles, and inserts buttons the end user can use to choose which article solved the request.

     Note: This placeholder includes two pieces of text that are determined by the user's profile language: The header Do any of these articles answer your question?, and the two buttons located underneath each suggested article Yes, close my request and View article.
   • {{autoreply.first_article_body}}

     Optional. This placeholder renders the first matching article (full HTML) into the email body, allowing end users to read the article and solve their problem without needing to leave the email experience.

   • {{autoreply.article_count}}

     Optional. This placeholder allows you to create an optional condition to send different body copy to customers based on how many articles are returned, for example:

     {% if autoreply.article_count > 0 %}
         Here are some great articles that may help:
         {{autoreply.article_list}}
         {{autoreply.first_article_body}}
     {% endif %}

     Note: Autoreplies are not compatible with the {{header}} placeholder, which is an unsupported and deprecated placeholder that some customers may still be using in their HTML Email Template. The HTML Email template can be found in Admin Center, by clicking the Channels icon () in the sidebar, then selecting Talk and email > Email and scrolling to the Email templates section.

     While this placeholder currently functions with standard email notifications, it produces a malformed header in autoreply emails To resolve the issue, remove this {{header}} placeholder from the Zendesk HTML Email template. To replicate the look and feel of this placeholder, you can add the following code (with appropriate styling added as desired) to the Email Body section of your account's Notify Requester triggers.

      <a href="{{ticket.link}}">Ticket #{{ticket.id}}: {{ticket.title}}</a>

6. In the section Configure labels and test autoreply, click Configure and test to filter the list of offered help center articles based on labels:

   

   • Ticket brand: Use the drop-down to select a brand to run the test on. The brand selected here is purely for testing purposes, and will not be added to the trigger you are creating.
   • Ticket subject: This field is used to test the articles returned when a ticket is filed with this subject.
   • Ticket description: Enter a short description of seven or more words, written from the ticket submitter's perspective.
   • Article restrictions by label: Enter labels you want to use to filter the articles. As you type into the tag field, autocomplete displays available labels beginning with the same word or characters. Any articles with any of these labels will be used as potential autoreply articles.
7. Click Show suggested answers for a list of articles the user may receive if these labels are applied when submitting a similar ticket. If you approve, click Apply labels; if you don't, edit the entries and try again, or click Cancel.
8. If you’re creating a trigger, click Create.

   If you’re updating an existing trigger, click Save.

Converting a default trigger to an email autoreply with article suggestions

Zendesk Support provides a set of standard triggers, including triggers for email notifications. After enabling autoreplies, you can update the default Notify requester and CCs of received request and Notify requester of new proactive ticket triggers to use the Autoreply with articles action.

To convert a default trigger to an email autoreply with articles

1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Triggers.
2. Click the title of the Notify requester and CCs of received request or Notify requester of new proactive ticket trigger you want to edit.
3. In the triggers Actions section, click the Convert to autoreply with articles button.

   

   This updates the trigger, including adding the autoreply placeholders into the email body.

4. Edit the email as needed, and click Save.

Configuring an advanced email autoreply

To set up an advanced email autoreply, create a new trigger or update an existing one to use the Autoreply action. Triggers for advanced autoreplies typically use the Intent, Language, or Sentiment conditions for intelligent triage. For more information about these trigger conditions, see Creating triggers for automatically triaged tickets.

To configure an advanced email autoreply

1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Triggers.
   • To create a trigger, click Create trigger.
   • To edit a trigger, click the title of the trigger you want to edit.
2. Configure the trigger conditions. For example, you may want to send an autoreply email to new requests from end users based on intent and language. That trigger would include the following conditions:
   • Ticket | Is | Created

     AND

   • Requester: Role | Is | (end user)

     AND

   • Intent | Is | <select the intent you want the trigger to be based on>

     AND

   • Language | Is | <select the language you want the trigger to be based on>
3. Next, configure the trigger to perform the following action:
   • Autoreply

     This establishes that all tickets that meet the above conditions will send your autoreply to the ticket requester.

4. When you select Autoreply from the Actions drop-down, the autoreply field appears:

   

5. Fill out the body text you want to include in the autoreply. You can also click View available placeholders to view and copy placeholder text.
6. If you’re creating a trigger, click Create. If you’re updating an existing trigger, click Save.

Accessing email autoreplies

For Zendesk Support Suite accounts, email autoreply triggers appear in the Autoreplies page’s Email tab. In Admin Center, click Channels in the sidebar, then select Bots and automations > Bots. Then click Manage autoreplies.

For accounts on legacy Support Suite plans, or the standalone Zendesk Support + Guide package, autoreplies are called Article Recommendations. For these accounts, you can access email autoreply triggers on the Article Recommendations page’s Email tab. In Admin Center, click Channels in the sidebar, then select Bots and automations > Article recommendations. Then click the Emails tab.