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.
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
- In Admin Center, click
Channels in the sidebar, then select Messaging and social > Messaging.
- Open a channel for editing.
The Edit screen displays.
- Click Auto-responder.
- Activate the auto-responder.
- Edit the default auto-responder message.
- 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.
Hi, {{firstName}}, Thanks for reaching out. An agent will be with you soon.
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.
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.
22 comments
科研市集
Hi Erika Camille Sundian,
We used app of Social Messaging and finished our SNS connection. How can I set conditions about message content text to trigger ticket's status?
1
Amy Dee
Hi RD-Joyce! At this time, Support ticket triggers don't fire within a live messaging conversation. You wouldn't be able to fire a ticket trigger based on the autoresponder's text. You should be able to use triggers at ticket creation to get things started, though. There are a lot of different approaches for different social channels, so I recommend checking out our Social Messaging resources page for more ideas.
I hope this helps!
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Daniël Nieuwendijk
It looks like emojis aren't supported?
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Ntsako Masinge
Hi Support,
Need your assistance please.
The Facebook Messenger messages that do come through Zendesk aren’t kept open, once the agent has replied. When send (or enter) is clicked in response to client, the ticket is closed and it shows to the client that the agent has left the chat.When this happens, it is closed to me on messenger as well, so the client's query goes totally unresolved.In order to recover that ticket, agents need to search through the entire Zendesk, to retrieve the chat.
Any idea why?
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Charles Gresula
Hi Ntsako Masinge,
It seems that this needs further investigation so I am creating a ticket for this to be further checked.
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Ntsako Masinge
Hi @...,
Noted. I will await feedback. Thank you.
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Charles Gresula
Hi @Daniël Nieuwendijk
![](/hc/user_images/FHYr7uzYoH1OZGlDkakAGA.png)
![](/hc/user_images/2y7uFN8y-gm4rqgoKMO8Iw.png)
As per our testing, it appears that you can use/add an emoji in the auto responder. Here's a sample screenshot we did on a test account
You just have to manually add the emoji text on the auto responder text to make it work, here's what we did on our test account.
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Daniël Nieuwendijk
Thanks for the reply @.... I tried again, using a 👋 emoji. Now it works! Maybe I did something wrong earlier.
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Daniël Nieuwendijk
In our instance of Zendesk, when a WhatsApp message is received from WhatsApp number xy, the resulting ticket is not attributed to an existing user with phone number xy. This makes it necessary to manually merge users, which in my view should happen automatically and, frankly, is difficult to explain to the team. Can this be added to the feature backlog?
2
Charles Gresula
Hello Daniël ,
I understand that the current setup where WhatsApp (or any social, for that matter) users will create a new identity in Zendesk instead of automatically merging to an existing user is affecting your workflow. I am so sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.
I've marked this conversation as product feedback for review, which means that your input will be aggregated as a part of our Voice of the Customer program that provides customer feedback to our product development teams.
In addition, I encourage you to create a new post in the General Product Feedback topic in our community 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.
Specific examples, details about impact, and how you currently handle things are helpful for our product teams to understand the full scope of the need when working on solutions. You may also want to review the Product feedback guidelines and how to write an effective feedback post [https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360004391547-Product-feedback-guidelines-how-to-write-a-good-feedback-post].
We truly value customer feedback and your voice and votes in the forums help influence future Zendesk functionality.
-1
Tom
Hello! Thanks for the helpful article! I use software called cucomm to develop my business. The program automatically sends messages to users on Facebook. It’s convenient and saves time. Facebook sales have grown thanks to this program.
0
Alan
Hello!
Are there any plans to improve the functionality of the auto responder? We would like to be able to send responses based on keywords in the user's initial message.
Thank you!
0
Candy Orate
Hi. what is the reason why the auto responder only firing once. the first ticket was already closed. it should be fired again on the next message.
0
Graziano
Hey,
Is there a way to set the auto-responder to trigger once only during an active conversation instead of triggering every time we get a response from a customer?
Thank you!
0
Dane
If it has not been more than 24 hours since the last automatic response, the trigger will not fire even for a new ticket.
Hi Graziano,
It will fire on each interaction every 24 hours. Unfortunately, the option to disable it is not available.
0
Lorenzo
Dane can you let us know if we can incorporate multimedial links in the text of the autoresponder? I tried using HTML and it didn't work
0
Dane
Only plain text format is supported.
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Albert Llongueras
How can I set up an auto reply message to an incomming whatsapp based on a custom field? I've tried using triggers in the chat module but I'm not able to get the auto response.
Thanks,
0
Dane
For automatic response on social channels, it is only configurable when an end-user sends an inbound message. When using triggers, you only have the capability to send a text to the user.
You can also check if your devs can utilize SunCo Sending Messages. Please take note that this needs SunCo subscription.
0
Albert Llongueras
Yes, what I need is to send an automatic message when an end-user sends an inbound message. Where and how should I configure?
0
Albert Llongueras
news? I don't think a SunCo subscription is needed for this as I only want to auto-reply the customer within the next 24 hours from the customer message.
0
Dane
The only natively available automatic responses is the one discussed above. For other use cases, SunCo Sending Messages is the way to go.
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