Sending automatic responses to social messages

What's my plan?

Customers without Zendesk Suite must have Support and Chat with the Social Messaging add-on to use this feature.

If you have added Facebook Messenger, X (formerly Twitter) DM, WhatsApp, LINE, or WeChat channels, you may want to set up the auto-responder for those channels. The auto-responder sends messages automatically to an end user when you receive their messages.

This article contains the following sections:

• About the auto-responder
• Setting up the auto-responder
• Adding user properties to automatic responses

About the auto-responder

You need to set up the auto-responder for each of the social messaging accounts you have added to Zendesk. You can do this once for each channel. You must be an admin to set up the auto-responder.

Here's how the auto-responder works:

• There’s no character limit for the automatic response.
• The auto-responder does not support dynamic content. See Using dynamic content to translate your ticket fields (Professional and Enterprise).
• The automatic response is sent once a day, not every time the end user sends a message.
• Automatic responses do not show up in ticket events. See Viewing all events of a ticket.
• If you have automatic responses set up via chat triggers for live chats, they may also apply to social messaging tickets. Triggers created with the following conditions and actions apply to social messaging tickets:
  • Chat trigger conditions: Visitor department, Account status, Department status, or Chat-related information (all types).
  • Chat trigger actions: Send message to visitor.
• Chat triggers created with other conditions and actions will not work for social messaging.

Setting up the auto-responder

If you set up the auto-responder for your social messaging channels, the auto-responder will send messages automatically to an end user when you receive their messages.

To set up the auto-responder for WhatsApp, LINE, or WeChat

1. In Admin Center, click Channels in the sidebar, then select Messaging and social > Messaging.
2. Open a channel for editing.

   The Edit screen displays.

3. Click Auto-responder.
4. Activate the auto-responder.
5. Edit the default auto-responder message.

   

6. Click Save.

Adding user properties to automatic responses

You can add user properties to the automatic response, such as the user’s first and last name, if desired.

For example, if your automatic response is configured like this:

Hi, {{firstName}}, Thanks for reaching out. An agent will be with you soon.

The message sent to a user named Martin Smithson looks like this:

Hi Martin, Thanks for reaching out. An agent will be with you soon.

If the user's first name can't be resolved, the message looks like this:

Hi, Thanks for reaching out. An agent will be with you soon.

Also, you can include a default value in the placeholder. This value is used if the user's first name can't be resolved.

For example, if your automatic response is configured like this:

Hi, {{firstName || there}}, Thanks for reaching out. An agent will be with you soon.

The message sent looks like this when the user's first name can't be resolved:

Hi there, Thanks for reaching out. An agent will be with you soon.

For more information about what properties you can use and how to correctly format them, see Managing user information in the Sunshine Conversations help center. The user properties used in the automatic response aren’t the same as user property keywords used in other parts of Zendesk Support.