Introduction

Whilst Zendesk’s bots are being powered more and more by AI, there are also plenty of cases where a good old flow chart-style bit of programming are required, especially where company-specific SOPs (for example, around returns policy) are in play.

With this in mind, it’s as crucial as ever to know how to build a robust, versatile and genuinely useful flow that your customers can seamlessly navigate through when interacting with your bots.

We’ve previously covered how to set up an Answer Bot and fine-tune its persona  but knowing how to structure its Answers function is a whole different beast!

Getting Started

With a new bot created, head over to the Answers section. This is where we’ll build all the various flows that are unique to your company.

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You can think of Answers as sections of the giant flow chart that defines your bot’s behaviour and thus your customer experience.

Rather than building one giant flow chart, Zendesk allows us to break down the various stages into different, more easily-managed branches. Typically, these are separated by where the customer is in their journey or by the topic that the customer needs help with.

As you’ll see, Zendesk already provides one Answer for you. This one allows customers to get through to one of your agents.

Get Familiar with the Anatomy of an Answer

Go ahead and open up the Talk to a human Answer. It’ll be a great example for us to use to get familiar with some of the key functions available to us.

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Answers always flow from the top down. As we can see, the name of this Answer is Talk to a human.

Every element in an Answer is clickable (apart from the lines). Clicking an element opens its corresponding properties field in a side-bar on the right of your screen.

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Here you can rename your Answer whilst editing it.

Now try clicking on the blue clock icon.

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As the description on the right explains, this step allows your Answer to branch based on your company’s business hours (known as Schedule inside Zendesk).

This is often essential as, if your agents are online, you may want to connect the customer to your team, whereas, if it’s the middle of the night and no one’s online, promising to connect your customer to an agent right away would not be a good idea!

Let’s keep going down the Answer to look at some other key concepts.

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As you can see, based on whether the CS team is currently online or not, the customer will be channeled down one branch of the Answer or the other.

As is the case here, it’s quite often that these parallel branches are quite similar as they are, in essence, trying to do the same thing, just with different limitations of the type of human help they can offer right away.

The first row contains two messages. Messages are as simple a function as they come. They send a one-way message to the customer and that’s it.

Click on a message to see its input field.

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As you can see, this Message asks the customer to leave their details, so we need to follow up the Message with a function that allows them to do this in a way that Zendesk can compute (the customer is always free to type in anything they like into the chat section at the bottom, but giving the customer specific fields to fill out will prove fruitful down the line).

More Answer Functions

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The next set of functions are of the “Ask for details” kind. Ask for details are best utilized following a message, as they can’t contain a message to ask for the details themselves.

In short, Ask for details allows you to request the customer to populate any of your existing ticket fields, whether they’re Zendesk’s default fields or your own custom fields. Unlike if the customer simply typed in the chat field at the bottom of the bot, the answers they enter here will populate the ticket fields on the ticket, allowing automations to run and providing agents with quick access to vital information. This information is also essential if you want to build solid reporting based on your bot.

You can add as many custom fields as you like to an Ask for details element. We’ll cover why you might want to use this feature more in Part 2.

The final element in this Answer is the Transfer element.

How to End an Answer

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This element does what it says on the tin, plus a bit more. Without having to do any further configuring, if a user reaches this part of your Answer, a ticket will be created. Up until now, the whole interaction has taken place without a ticket being created.

As you’ll see if you select one of the Transfer elements, there is an option to add a message (which should vary depending on if the customer should expect an immediate response or not).

That completes the walkthrough of a basic Conversation Bot Answer flow. In Part 2, we’ll cover some of the more powerful functions available to us in a Zendesk bot answer including multiple ways to populate custom fields, Ask if a question is resolved and more.