How to create an answer Bot on Zendesk

Answer bots are growing in popularity as more and more businesses recognize the value of having a bot that can handle basic customer support tasks, like answering the most common questions related to their products. These bots can also be useful for marketing purposes as they can provide insights into what customers need and want from a company or brand. Answer bots have even been used by companies such as Amazon, Uber, and Netflix to provide customers with information about products or services. 

Some of the most common use cases are:

- Customer service

- Support queries

- Sales inquiries

- Product information

- Web site navigation

What are the benefits of an Answer Bot?

Answer bots have some benefits over human customer service agents, but they also have some limitations because they lack the ability to understand context and respond accordingly. However, the benefits far outweigh the current shortcomings. The best part is, the technology will continue to improve over time, enabling your organization to optimize service and support as more customers engage with it.

There are a number of advantages to using an Answer Bot, but the key benefits are that they provide:

- A more personalized experience for customers: Customers report having a more interactive experience with answer bots than with static FAQs on websites or social media posts.

- Improved customer service: Who doesn’t want customer service that’s available 24 hours a day?

- Reduced costs for businesses: Bots can be deployed to supplement or replace call centers altogether,

- It is available in multiple languages: This is pretty self explanatory given how globally connected we are. The internet has exposed you to customers across the globe. And you need to speak their language.

- Customizing the bot to suit your brand’s voice and tone: Answer Bot can understand natural language, provide instant responses, and offer personalized assistance.

- Managing customer conversations in one place: It can be integrated with other tools like Salesforce or HubSpot. Now you can respond to all customer interactions on a single channel or across multiple channels

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How to create a Zendesk Answer Bot

According to the Answer Bot Quickstart Guide, creating an Answer Bot can be done in three simple steps – which we’ll discuss below. For optimizing the bot once it’s enabled, you’ll need to visit this page.

Step #1 – Activate the Answer Bot

This process will be a little different depending on what type of customer you are – either Zendesk Suite or Support+Guide.

• To start, you’ll first need to visit the Admin Center.
• Once you’re there, click the Channels icon in the sidebar and select Bots and automations > Article recommendations.
• From here, click the Activate Answer Bot button (Zendesk Suite users) or Try Answer Bot for 30 days to activate your 30-day unlimited trial (Support + Guide users).

Step #2 – Evaluate your knowledge base content

You want to audit your content for relevant topics, titles, and keywords so that its optimized for customer search. Here are a few links form Zendesk to help get your content ready:

• Creating and editing articles in the knowledge base
• Optimizing your articles for Answer Bot
• Understanding Content Cues

Step #3 – Enable the Answer Bot

According to Zendesk, you can implement the bot throughout your Zendesk products and integrations.

Though they give you the freedom to add it wherever you want, they also share some placement best practices:

• Understanding everywhere you can use Answer Bot
• Enabling and configuring Article Recommendations for email notifications
• Enabling and configuring Article Recommendations for web forms
• Using the Answer Bot for Slack integration
• Searching and linking articles using the Knowledge Capture app
• Enabling and using Answer Bot in Web Widget (Classic)
• Answer Bot API

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