Best practices: Preparing to use Answer Bot

When you’re starting out with Answer Bot, it can be difficult to know how to prepare for and use the feature in the best way possible. In this article, we’ve included four things you can do before, and shortly after, implementing Answer Bot, that can set you up for success.

Note: Answer Bot is also available on Zendesk Support accounts when paired with Zendesk Guide.

This article includes the following suggestions:

• Writing the right articles
• Using customer segments and article labels together
• Checking your placeholders
• Monitoring early Answer Bot performance

For a list of all Answer Bot-related documentation, see Answer Bot resources.

Writing the right articles

In many cases, we find that customers haven’t done enough prep work before they start wanting to use Answer Bot. One key step you can take is to take audit your recent tickets -- maybe from the previous week -- to find tickets where customers really could have self-solved their problem.

For instance:

• Review tickets where a macro was used to solve the problem in one touch. Could there be an article for this? Go write that article.
• Review common tickets that were just answered in one touch: Could there be an article for those that would have allowed customers to self-solve? Go write that article.

Related articles:

• Optimizing your articles for Answer Bot

Using customer segments and article labels together

The power of article labels really becomes evident in a situation where you can segment your customers during ticket creation. Here’s a scenario:

You’re a game developer supporting iOS and Android platforms. You have two channels for incoming tickets: one for iOS issues and one for Android. Using trigger conditions, you can create two Answer Bot triggers, one for each channel. Then you can use article labels to serve up only iOS or Android articles where they make sense.

Your customers may be more varied than that, so stop for a second and really think about how you can best segment them, and create useful conditions around them. Then, you can serve them the best articles possible.

Related articles:

• Best practices: Using labels with Answer Bot

Checking your placeholders

It almost goes without saying, but if you don’t put gas in the car, the car isn’t going anywhere. The Answer Bot placeholders are a key part of the feature. They determine how suggested articles are displayed in the responses sent to your end users.

Make sure you set them up properly using the {{answer_bot.article_list}} and {{answer_bot.first_article_body}}:

Related articles:

• Creating and managing triggers for Answer Bot

Monitoring early Answer Bot performance

We’ve built all the key data points into Insights to allow you to really monitor, report, and slice away at your tickets and their deflection data. There is so much you can learn if you spend the time building a few reports (or just digging into the default ones).

About 48 hours after you begin using Answer Bot - that is, after it's been turned on and used to respond to tickets - the Deflection tab is added to your Insights dashboard. This tab is where you can see how Answer Bot is working for you

Related articles:

• Analyzing your Answer Bot activity