- For customers who start using AI agents on or after April 16, 2024, pricing will be applied starting July 10, 2024.
- For customers already using Zendesk bots before April 16, 2024, new pricing will be applied on the first account renewal date after July 10, 2024.
AI agents are the next generation of Zendesk bots. Powered by Zendesk AI, AI agents are designed to fully resolve customer issues, no matter the complexity. As AI becomes increasingly essential to customer interactions, AI agents enable you to succeed in a marketplace moving towards greater automation and efficiency. AI agents are available to all Zendesk customers on Suite or Support plans.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the admin tasks required to set up an AI agent and introduce you to the capabilities it can use to deliver fully-automated support to your customers.
For a quick look at what AI agents can do, see Overview of AI agents.
You can also view this video tutorial about AI agents:
Zendesk AI agents (3:07)
Create a conversational AI agent
Before you can create an AI agent, you’ll need to give it one or more channels where it can communicate with your customers. Messaging is the most commonly-used, but email and other channels can get your AI agent places that messaging can’t.
Messaging lets you have rich conversations with your customers that are persistent, with full context and history. You can embed a Web Widget in your website or help center, mobile apps, social, and third-party channels, making it easy for your customers to connect with your AI agent.
Configure a basic messaging channel
- Customize the look and feel of the widget. Choose colors, add a logo (if you haven’t already) and title for your Web Widget, and create a custom launcher.
- Configure a default messaging response that can go to work immediately, welcoming your customers with customized greeting messages. You can also apply a support schedule to use separate responses based on the time of day.
Set up an AI-powered bot
- Start by adding a conversational bot in the widget’s response section.
- Give your AI agent an identity by making it a representation of your brand. Choose a name that makes it clear your customers are not talking to a human, and select the brand your AI agent will be connected to.
- Add an avatar whether custom or choose from our default icon to reinforce your organization and brand.
- Choose your language settings. AI agents can be configured to respond in one language, or in multiple languages, depending on your customers’ needs. A multilingual AI agent can translate incoming and outgoing messagings in a conversation.
- Opt in to generative replies for a quick start. With a help center and generative replies, your AI agent can respond to questions in a conversational manner using information pulled from relevant knowledge base articles.
- Give your AI agent a personality. Select a persona to give AI agent responses that reflect your organization’s tone making them a true representation of your brand.
Monitor common requests
Now that you’ve set up an AI-powered bot, give it some time to start handling customer requests – 48 hours should do – then take a look at the data before moving forward.
- Use the Insights dashboard to glean detailed information about your AI agent’s performance and user interactions. This dashboard offers a comprehensive overview of metrics, response performance, and coverage gaps. It can help you optimize your AI agent configuration and improve the self-service experience for your customers.
- Review conversation transcripts. Discover what questions customers can resolve without assistance from a human agent, and better understand automated resolutions.
Customize your AI agent
Next, create customized conversation flows that help your AI agents offer the best responses and guide customers through conversations that require more direction. Answers are the building blocks of your AI agent’s conversation flow. Each answer addresses a single question your customers might ask.
Create answers with bot builder
Bot builder, Zendesk’s click-to-configure answer designer, makes it easy to define your AI agent’s conversation flow.
- Add answers to the flow. Open the Answers tab on the AI agent’s edit page to view and create answers. The order in which they are created and listed on the page does not impact how they are delivered to your customers – the AI agent finds the answer it needs, wherever the customer is in the conversation.
- Customize answers with multiple steps. Choose from 11 step types, in any combination, to create the answers that determine how your AI agent reacts to different customer questions. Present customers with clickable options, help center articles, scrollable carousel panels, and more to help them self-solve their issue.
- Branch the conversation flow. Use conditional logic to help the AI agent evaluate and guide the conversation in the most useful direction, or send the customer down a different resolution path based on business hours.
- Add variables to messages. Variables can be used to personalize AI agent responses, send the conversation down a different path, or display dynamic information in an answer.
- Enhance answers with rich content. Add emojis, links, images, and gifs to create a more engaging experience for customers.
Train your AI agent to understand customer questions
Training phrases let you add up to 100 variations of a question that can result in an AI agent choosing a particular answer. They should include necessary basic details (“Renew membership” instead of “Renew”), and avoid generic phrases like “I want to” or “How do I” which can dilute a question’s core meaning. Customers don’t need to match a training phrase exactly to make a connection to an answer – spelling errors and minor phrasing differences are overlooked.
Increase AI agent accuracy with suggested intents
Add recommended intents to answers. These pre-trained intents can be used in place of training phrases to help your conversation bot match and deliver the most relevant answer for a customer's question.
Use an answer template as a starting point
Answer templates are examples of common answer topics and construction. Choose from more than a dozen templates to create an answer with a complete framework, then edit them to add specific information (a business hours schedule or API details, for example).
Identify and fill gaps in your AI agent’s knowledge
On the Insights dashboard you can access information that can help you identify customer questions that aren’t getting useful responses.
- Find commonly unanswered questions with intent suggestions. You can improve existing answers by adding suggestions, or create new answers to incorporate into a conversation flow.
- Review conversation transcripts. Conversations that resulted in automated resolutions can be used to understand effective answers, and unresolved conversation transcripts can reveal patterns and similarities in less-successful interactions.
Connect to external systems for advanced use cases
The Make API call step type lets you bring data in from, or send data out to, external sources.
- Retrieve order status from external systems (such as Shopify).
- Retrieve customer VIP status from external systems (such as CRM) and offer tailored experiences based on status.
- Cancel an order based on the order number provided by the customer.
Expand automation to email channels
If you’re using email or web forms in your support setup, you can add trigger-based autoreplies to customer notification responses to help them self-solve their requests. Autoreplies with articles use triggers to determine when the reply is sent and what information is included in the email or web form response, and add up to three links to relevant knowledge base articles. Autoreplies based on intelligent triage create custom responses to customer email requests based on AI predictions like intent, language, and sentiment.
Choose the tasks below that best match the setup you’re working towards for more information.
- Create email autoreplies with articles to create triggers that include help center articles in email responses. to help the customer resolve their issue.
- Create autoreplies with articles for web forms to do the same in web-based responses through your help center.
- Use intelligent triage to trigger AI-powered autoreplies that will directly answer a customer’s question based on AI predictions about intent, language, and sentiment. Requires the Advanced AI add-on
Monitor AI agent performance to improve support
- Analyze autoreply performance in email and web form notifications on the Answer Bot dashboard. Identify opportunities to improve suggestions, resolutions and click-through rate.
- Monitor bot builder activity on the Flow Builder performance tab, which shows more granular information about bot and answer performance.
If you have feedback or questions related to AI agents, visit our community forum where we collect and manage customer product feedback. For general assistance with your Zendesk products, contact Zendesk Customer Support.