How to create an auto reply for Facebook

I saw lately a couple of posts here that people are looking for a auto-reply function for the connected Facebook pages.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/226599587
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/203597387

I've set this up for our account last month and will share it with you ... and yes, i am also interested in the Zendesk Swag offered in the january e-mail 😎

I will try to explain as simple as possible, if you need it more detailed please comment. But enough talked, let's start :)

Why I've implemented it?

We have around 3k tickets per month in our company, approx. 10% of them are via Facebook Messenger Channel. At a certain point this were simply too much tickets each month, which have not the same customer service experience as over the E-Mail or Help-Center channel, where we've set up dozens of automated service e-mails.

I think especially for Facebook messages, this missing feature is very critical for Zendesk, since customers expect an answer within minutes not hours.

Implementation

In fact it just consists of 2 parts:

Trigger for determining when it should be sent
Extension for posting a public reply

Trigger

Conditions

Integration Account: Choose your Facebook page (watch out if you are using global pages, they have all the same name!)
Ticket Is: of course only created when we are dealing with an auto-response
Tags: just in case i am adding a tag to prevent multiple auto-replies, since I remember a service outage where Facebook messages got fetched dozens of times.
Requester Tractive: This is a user flag I've added to all the "Users" of our Facebook pages (Every Facebook page has a user in Zendesk, which is used when you write a customer first, or somebody is replying via business manager), so that a message created from ort marketing team e.g. reply to a post with a PM does also not get an auto-reply.

Actions

Before sending the message, I am checking if the tag is not set already, to prevent duplicate messages as written before
I am using my Extension to update the ticket with a public reply.

Extension

This extension will update the ticket itself via an API call. I know this is not the proper way according to Zendesk documentation, however i saw plenty of forum posts which are using this for example to write internal notes from triggers.

Url:

https://YOUR.zendesk.com/api/v2/tickets/{{ticket.id}}.json?ticket[comment][public]=true

Attribute Name:

ticket[comment][body]

Basic Authentication

Username: e-mail address + "/token"
Password: create an API token in your settings

Voila, after you made this everything should work. 👍

I hope i could help you a little bit, in case there is something not understandable or missing please let me know 😃

Andreas

PS: In addition to the nice auto replies you have, the facebook page you manage will also get the very responsive badge quickly :)

Dennis Killmer January 25, 2017 21:49

Thanks, Andreas! This worked perfectly for us.

Andreas Schuster January 25, 2017 21:55

Hi Dennis,

thanks for getting back to me, I am happy that you could achieve what you wanted. In case you've implemented some additional features, feel free to share with us here to make this article even better! :)

Best,
Andreas

Jennifer Rowe January 25, 2017 21:56

Thanks for sharing your tip, Andreas.

And you already have one happy customer. Nice work. :)

Mike Cartwright May 01, 2017 06:09

Many thanks for taking the time to share what you know, Andreas! We haven't set up auto-response for Facebook yet. Seeing what you've done here, I'd like to have this implemented ASAP.

Andreas Schuster May 01, 2017 19:37

Hi Mike,

thanks for your thoughts about my implementation.
I would love to your feedback as soon you've implemented it.

Best,
Andreas

Sachin Sabu August 31, 2017 09:20

Hello Andreas,

This looks good but I think Zendesk has changed UI and the screenshot seems to old which doesn't apply anymore.

Can you help me apply it to my account or do a video around the same? Will be really helpful.

Nicole Relyea August 31, 2017 19:11

Hey Sachin -

Welcome to the Zendesk Community! Hopefully Andreas will weigh in soon. :)

Roman Kisil September 10, 2017 11:32

If you are looking for an Auto Responder for your Personal Facebook Messages, I have developed an open-source app just for that. Visit https://faceply.io to download it. Or check out the source code on https://github.com/romankisil/Faceply.io