This article describes functionality available
only to customers who had a drafted or published AI agent as of February 2, 2025. For
information about equivalent functionality in the AI agents - Advanced add-on, see Building dialogues for AI agents - Advanced.
You can use bot builder to create answers for your AI agents for messaging, giving your customers the opportunity to self-serve their support issues before connecting with agents. This article introduces the bot builder UI and basic functionality. For information about working with bot builder, see Building an AI agent for messaging using answers.
Bot builder is the tool you use to create answers for your AI agent for messaging. Bot builder lets you control how the AI agent behaves in response to customer input.
Each bot builder component plays an important role in building an answer:
- Header, which appears at the top of the screen, above the flow. In the header, you'll find breadcrumbs for the answer's AI agent as well as the Preview and Done buttons.
- Flow, your answer represented in a decision tree format. The flow is a series of connected steps representing the interaction the AI agent can have with a customer. You can select a step to configure the AI agent's responses, and add steps to the answer. The navigation controls at the bottom of the flow allow you to zoom in and out of the answer, or pan to areas in the answer. You can also pinch to zoom using a touchpad or touch screen.
-
Configuration panel, where you can customize each step in your answer. The
appearance of this panel changes based on what type of AI agent step you're working on.
- Answer builder (shown above), displayed when you initially create an answer, and when you select the top step in the answer. Here, you can configure your answer intent, and work with your question variations.
- Configuration tab, which appears when you select a step to the answer, or add a new step to an answer. Here, you can select the type of step you want to add to your answer, add and edit automated messages, and build lists of options for your customers to choose from. For detailed information on these step types, including usage and configuration rules, visual examples of the steps in the bot builder, and how each appears to your customers in a Web Widget, see Understanding AI agent step types.
- Preview tab, for previewing the customer experience created by the answer, before releasing it to your customers. Click the Preview tab in the Configuration panel to view.
119 comments
Lucy Husband
Can anyone help with how to loop back to start over if a user has decided they would like to ask another question once they have selected 'yes' to 'does this answer your question?' - our configuration displays one last message to say 'Feel free to close this chat...While you are here, why not take a look at our available Boxes?'. However, if they then decide they have more questions do they have to completely come out of the chat and click back in to start over?
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Dainne Kiara Lucena-Laxamana
Hi Lucy Husband
The "start over" function used to be part of feedback flow changes, but the automated "Start over" option is no longer available. If you want to keep this functionality and are not using a greeting message, you can guide end users to navigate to the start by typing in a key phrase. More information can be found here.
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Freyja
Hello! I want to activate Flow builder for our widget but I have few questions:
1) What happens if the user asks for something that is not pertinent? So in the case the bot is not trained. Does the boot provide random information (for example, a random bunch of articles that are the closest to the request) or say that it cannot find the answer? Is there a way to personalize eventually the "not found" message?
2) Is it possible to "auto-populate" the user request? So, when the user starts to write he can see already the possible options.
3) Is it possible to configure it in the way that it already provides some options to the user based on the page the widget is? For example, the widget is on the Order&Checkout page. The user opens the widget and there is a message saying "How can we help you today?" and he already sees some options - order is blocked, payment is not working, I want to cancel an item, etc...
Many thanks as usual!
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Rebeca
Hi, we would like to enable messaging to be able to use the flow builder with the bot, so we can make it easier for users to self-serve and suggest answers. However, we don't have the capacity to offer live support yet.
If the customer says they are still having issues, is it possible to refer them to fill out one of our forms and submit a ticket instead of connecting to a human and having direct messaging?
Thanks
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Amie Brennan
hey Rebeca,
As far as I'm aware, you're not able to link the new messaging widget to ticket forms.
I wish you could however I'm pretty sure this ability doesn't exist yet. :(
Best,
Amie
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Dane
If the bot will not see anything related to your customer's query, it will ask your users to rephrase it.
As of the moment, it's not possible to auto populate the options. You can utilize intent so that your customers will automatically be routed to the correct flow based on keywords. This can also be used to display the most common concern that your customers might have.
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Jon Simone
We have been using the older web widget in both our help center and apps as the last time I played with flower builder it did not have feature parity with the classic web widget.
I am interested to see if this is the case now.
There were 2 major issues we had back in 2021 -
A. With Flow Builder all roads lead to sending you to an agent even if one wasn't available. The way we function we need to allow users to request a callback, live chat or leaving a message. Are these options now available in flow builder? This needs to be true on both web and in app and we currently have this functionality with the classic widget.
B. Flow Builder was unable to pay any attention to business hours, has this been resolved? Additionally, can it display a chat button when an agent is available and make it disapear when an agent isn't?
I am also interested in any future collaborations with any LLM AI services.
Thank you,
Jon
1
Jason Walker-C
Jon Simone Yes both are now solved.
A. Yes, you can use the send a message step at the end of flows.
B. It will obey business hours. You can use that at the beginning and the end of a flow. Good note towards the end here. https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408822398106-Creating-a-schedule-with-operating-hours
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Tuule
Hi! Is there programmatic access available to the flow builder, i.e. an API? I couldn't find anything at https://developer.zendesk.com/api-reference.
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Greg Katechis
Hi Tuule, there is not at this time and I'm not sure if that's something that's on any roadmap. If you have a good use-case for this, I'd recommend posting in the product feedback forum so that the correct people can get eyes on it!
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Dylan Lopez
As all our bot building will originally be built within Sandbox is there anyway to currently export/copy the content to Production?
If this is not possible now is there plans in the near future to have this feature available to us?
I can picture this being extremely problematic to accounts which require a large selection of answers and options - recreating this from scratch in production doesn't seem feasible in this use case!
1
Amie Brennan
hey Dylan Lopez
There's no way to copy content from the sandbox to production via the click of a button. You would need to potentially look at using the API to do any type of copying at the moment.
The other option would be to use a service like https://www.salto.io which can sync a prod & sandbox account together.
I do hear there are plans to release a feature to allow for sandbox content to be pushed back to production however when that gem might fruit, no one really knows.
Hope this helps. :)
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Mike Landers
We're using the bot on our Android devices, but we can't find an intuitive way to close/refresh the chat widget after it's transferred to an agent.
Can you provide documentation or instructions on how to close/refresh the bot at the end of the flow?
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Akash
Amie Brennan : Do you know by any chance what bot they are using at Dan Murphy's? https://www.danmurphys.com.au/dm/home
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Evan McGivern
Similarly to AnswerBot is it possible via messaging and flowbuilder to analyse the interactions our customers had with the flowbuilder bot that we deflected and it didn't turn into a ticket directly?
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Mike DR
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Andres
So I made a bot, and I turned on the web widget, but I can't figure out how to make the bot appear in the web widget. The "help" button appears in the lower right, but it's not the bot I created, it just ask for email and "how can we help you" with an attachment option, but it's not the bot I created.
What am I missing? I want the help chat that appears in the lower right to be the bot I created.
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JR Lausin
Hi Andes,
I will be creating a ticket on your inquiry so we can further assist you on this. Please expect an email about your ticket.
0
Liam Kelly
How do I see the flow builder? My screen looks very different from what I see here. Is there something I am missing?
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Francis Casino
The bot builder serves as the essential tool through which you craft responses for your conversations, incorporate training phrases, define answers and steps, and ultimately launch your conversational experiences. Every answer-centric flow you design for your bot is constructed within the bot builder.
If you encounter any difficulties accessing the bot builder, I recommend referring to the instructional video provided in this article. The video resource will assist you in resolving any issues related to accessing the bot builder effectively.
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但木
Dear Zendesk team.
Can the flow that I am using inside an organization (flowbuider) be copy-pasted (automatically transferred) to another one of my organizations? supposing I do not have to build everything all over again.
Thanks.
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Mike DR
Have you tried cloning the bot then linking it to the other org's channel?
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Lisa Tam
Hi Evan McGivern
Contained bot conversations can't be viewed today but we are planning to make this available later in the year. You can find more details about it in this post.
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Fatima
Hello!
I was wondering if there's a way in which I can include the link of an article that can be useful for an online article within a Bot Message.
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Taylor collins
Requesting a feature that I've seen many other uses ask about but I've not seen a clear answer for yet:
When configuring a bot, there needs to be a conditional step for "If agents available", where the bot easily knows what to do if the team is offline/at capacity or not by routing tickets to email.
This is something we had in the classic web widget that seems to be a mystery now.
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Austin Pape
Hi,
Working on a chat bot. I need the user(customer) to be able to describe an issue, and the bot save the described issue in a custom field that i can use to auto populate a ticket. How would i go about this?
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Amie Brennan
Hey Austin Pape,
You'll need to create a simple text field and add it in to the bot flow for a user to describe the issue and it be populates into a custom field.
Multiline fields are not accepts in the bot flows yet (from memory) hence why you need to use a custom text field for this.
Hope this helps. :)
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Mohammed CW
What is the duration for which the chatbot remains inactive for a customer after they have submitted a query? Currently, once a query is placed, the customer is unable to interact with the chatbot again for any additional queries.
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Amie Brennan
hey Mohammed CW
It's 10 mins by default. However there is a new feature which allows customer to start more then 1 convo for additional queries. It's called the multi-conversation feature. I'd recommend turning this on if you haven't as it sounds exactly like what you're looking for here.
Check out the guide here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/8008427696410-Allowing-multiple-messaging-conversations
Hope this helps. :)
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