Summary: ◀▼
Auto assist is an AI-powered assistant that helps you handle tickets with suggested replies, actions, and agent instructions based on procedures, public help center articles, and similar solved tickets. It can reduce repetitive work, keep responses consistent, and help you close tickets faster, while you stay in control because agent approval is required before anything is sent.
Auto assist is an AI-powered assistant for your agents. Using large language model (LLM) technology, auto assist understands the contents of submitted tickets and makes suggestions to your agents on how to solve them.
With auto assist, agents spend less time on repetitive tickets, solve tickets in a more consistent way, and ultimately close more tickets.
Watch the demo video below to see auto assist in action, or read on for more information about auto assist.
Zendesk agent copilot featuring auto assist (4:43)
This article contains the following topics:
- Understanding auto assist and how it works
- Understanding auto assist sources for suggestions
- Understanding auto assist suggestions
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Understanding auto assist and how it works
Auto assist is an AI-powered tool that proactively makes suggestions to your agents to help them handle tickets. These suggestions appear in the ticket interface in place of the composer and require agent approval before being sent to a customer. Customers aren't aware of auto assist during their interactions with agents, and agents are always in control of the replies they send to customers.
When using auto assist, agents don’t have to compose replies or execute actions themselves. Instead, agents review and approve the replies or actions suggested by auto assist. To learn more about the agent experience with auto assist, see Using auto assist to solve tickets.
Understanding auto assist sources for suggestions
Auto assist can suggest replies on any topic based on the following sources:
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Procedures: Auto assist may suggest replies, actions, macros, and instructions based on manually created or AI-generated procedures. Your procedures can directly link to actions, action flows, macros, instructions, articles, and also reference certain ticket fields. Auto assist uses this procedure content, along with its built-in LLM training, to generate suggestions. You don’t need to map specific procedures to specific topics or other ticket metadata. Auto assist understands the content of a customer’s request out of the box and can map it to an existing procedure. See Understanding procedures to learn more.
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Help center articles: If a relevant procedure isn't found, then auto assist uses your public help center articles to generate suggested replies. For auto assist to use help center articles as a source:
- Your help center articles must be public
- Your help center can't be restricted to only signed-in users
- Only articles with a brand and language matching the ticket brand and language are used for reply generation. For example, if the brand on a ticket is Obscura, then only articles with the Obscura brand are considered. Keep in mind that public help center articles that match the brand and language of the ticket can't be excluded from auto assist.
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Similar solved tickets: Auto assist may use similar solved tickets as an additional source for text suggestions when relevant procedures or help center articles aren’t available.
Understanding auto assist suggestions
When making suggestions, auto assist takes into account the sources listed above and all public ticket comments in the conversation, including previously generated comments approved by the agent. Suggestions are made in response to only end-user comments, not agent comments.
Auto assist makes the following types of suggestions:
| Suggestion type | Description |
|---|---|
| Replies for the agent to make |
Text replies may include suggestions such as explaining a business policy to a customer, or helping the customer troubleshoot a problem with a product. Replies suggested by auto assist are automatically adapted to the conversation's tone and writing style to minimize the time agents spend editing responses. |
| Actions for the agent to take |
Auto assist may make suggestions for the agent to perform certain actions. For example, checking the status of a current order in Shopify, querying and modifying your own internal business systems, or performing third-party actions via API. Actions are suggested by auto assist only if they're defined in your procedures. The one exception to this is that auto assist may suggest setting a ticket status to Solved, even if this action isn't included in your procedures. Some actions, such as checking an order status, may be performed automatically by auto assist if the action was pre-approved by you or another admin in a procedure. Actions that are performed automatically are logged in the ticket's events and in the conversation log so that the agent is aware. For more information, see Understanding pre-approved actions. |
| Instructions for the agent to follow |
Auto assist suggests instructions to agents based on the flow of their conversation. Instructions are steps that agents should perform manually. For example, your procedures might include instructions for checking your internal stock management system if auto assist can't access it. Instructions for agents are suggested by auto assist only if they're defined in your procedures. |
Auto assist suggestions appear in tickets in the Agent Workspace interface in place of the composer. If you have permission, you can view the source auto assist used to generate the suggestion. See Viewing sources for auto assist suggestions to learn more.
If you don't have permission to view an auto assist suggestion's source, see Understanding auto assist sources for suggestions.