Using autoreplies in email notifications

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.

Autoreplies are used to respond to support tickets by sending an automated email notification in response to customer support requests. This encourages self-service in your customer base, and raises awareness of your knowledge base offerings. It analyzes titles, text, and labels to select the best articles in your help center.

There are two levels of autoreplies you can use in email notifications:

• A standard autoreply, also called autoreplies with articles, is an automated response to a customer’s request sent through an email or web form. This action includes suggested help center articles in the email response to help the customer resolve their issue. You can create email autoreplies using triggers, which determine when the reply is sent and what information is included in the email response.
• An advanced autoreply attempts to directly answer the customer’s request in an email response. The autoreply is typically triggered based on AI predictions about intent, language, and sentiment. These autoreplies are available as part of the Advanced AI add-on.

Both types of autoreplies use triggers to define their behavior. For more information, see Configuring email autoreplies to deflect requests.

This article contains the following topics:

• Understanding the end user experience
• Activating and configuring autoreplies for email notifications
• Testing email notification results

Understanding the end user experience

When you configure autoreplies, the end user receives an automated email response to their support request. Standard autoreplies with articles and advanced autoreplies offer different end user experiences.

Standard autoreplies with articles

For standard autoreplies with articles, the email includes a list of suggested articles and other information provided by the placeholders used in the autoreply with articles trigger.

From here, the end user can perform a number of actions, including:

• Clicking any of the suggested article links. This opens the help center article in a new tab. From there, the user can read the article, click to see to their help request, and indicate whether it helped them answer their question:

  

• Clicking the request number opens the request in a new tab.
• Clicking Yes, close my request opens the article in the help center, and closes the help request.
• Clicking No opens an optional feedback window, asking for more information about why the article didn't help.
• Reading the top suggested article. The entire article is included in the email.
• Clicking the Yes, close my request button, for any of the suggested articles. This opens the article in the help center, and closes the help request.
• Clicking No beneath the top suggested article opens an optional feedback window, asking for more information about why the article didn't help.

End users can return to the email and access the links as often as necessary.

Note: End users may be able to view restricted help center articles using the suggested article links without signing in. However, any further restricted action, such as accessing other restricted articles or viewing a profile, will require user authentication as determined by your security setup.

Advanced autoreplies

Advanced autoreplies use triggers to send automated responses to customer support requests. These responses are sent via email, and look like basic email notifications.

Customers can respond to the notification as they would any email. The text included in the notification is created using the Intent, Language, or Sentiment conditions for intelligent triage. For more information about these trigger conditions, see Creating triggers for automatically triaged tickets.

Activating and configuring autoreplies for email notifications

Both standard and advanced autoreplies have prerequisites that must be met before you can create triggers for them.

• Standard autoreplies require a create a Guide help center, with articles your customers may find useful. See Getting started with Guide for your help center for more information.
• Advanced autoreplies require the Advanced AI add-on. See About Zendesk Advanced AI for more information.

After this is done, you can access the autoreplies page in Admin Center to get started.

To start creating autoreplies in Admin Center

1. 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.

2. Click Manage autoreplies.
3. Click Get started with autoreplies, if not already activated.
4. Click Create triggers. See Configuring email autoreplies to deflect requests for more information.

Testing email notification results

You can test how your autoreply results would work on your existing support tickets, as soon as you create an autoreply trigger.

To test autoreply results

1. Create a new autoreply-related trigger, or open an existing trigger already configured for autoreplies.
2. At the bottom of the Actions section on the trigger's edit page, click the Configure and test button.
3. In the testing modal, titled Configure article labels and test Answer Bot, fill out the following information:
   • List of article labels to be included by Answer Bot for this trigger: 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 Answer Bot articles.
   • 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.
4. Click Show suggested answers, at the bottom of the modal, to display a list of articles your user might receive in an email notification, for a ticket with the labels and ticket information applied.
5. If the results are acceptable, click Apply labels, which saves trigger. If the results are not acceptable, edit the entries and try again, or click Cancel.