| Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends |
| Jan 23, 2024 | Jan 23, 2024 | Jan 24, 2024 |
We’re excited to announce that building bots just got easier with the release of answer linking. You can now connect one answer flow to another using the “link to another answer” step type. Answer linking reduces duplication of steps across your bot configuration, reducing the effort to build and maintain bots. You can also use it to give your customers an easy way to restart a bot conversation or return to a main menu of options according to your desired end-user experience.
What's changing?
The “link to another answer” step type is now available in the bot builder step menu and can be added at the end of answer branches. When added, you can select an answer to link to from the list, or you can link to the bot’s standard greeting message (start of the conversation in the bot’s Setup tab).
Why is Zendesk making this change?
Zendesk is continually investing in making bots easier to build and maintain, and more flexible to configure in order to meet your business needs and deliver on your automated customer support vision.
We’ve received feedback that you have found it challenging to build bots without creating significant duplication of steps across answers, and then found it hard to maintain when updates are required. We’ve also heard that your customers want an easy way to kick off their bot flow again from the top when they’ve followed the wrong path and aren’t sure how to phrase their issue using free text. Answer linking is designed to solve these problems.
What do I need to do?
No action is required. We encourage you to explore this new answer linking feature and provide feedback on how it’s working for you. If you have a very large bot configuration with lots of repetition, consider how you can create reusable answer flows that can be tied together. This will help reduce complexity and bot maintenance effort.