The bot has three helpful skills so you can automate 100% of your support. We call these Help: Article Lookup, Help: Ticket Creation, and Help: Article Lookup and Ticket Creation. Below, we go through each one to explain what they do, how they look within the bot builder, and the skill's technical flow. Click here to set it up now!

Help: Article Lookup is available on all paid plans.
Help: Ticket Creation and Help: Article Lookup and Ticket Creation are available on our Premium plan and above.
This article is meant to be exhaustive, but don't be nervous. If you have questions, let us know!

In this doc we'll cover:

• Help: Article Lookup
• Article Lookup Within Welcome Messages
• Help: Article Lookup Integrations
• Help: Ticket Creation
• What is Added in Zendesk
• Help: Ticket Creation Integrations
• Help: Article Lookup and Ticket Creation
• Global Bot Responses
• Enable the Bot to Automate Your Support

Help: Article Lookup

When a site visitor engages with your bot Playbook, your Bot can be enabled to automatically share articles based on what the visitor's message says.

Using an algorithm from the integrated knowledge-base, the bot searches for articles whose title and body text match terms in the visitor's message and sends them the top results while waiting for someone from your team to help out.

Within the Visual Builder of your Bot Playbook, click Add new and select Help: Article Lookup. An Article Lookup node will be added to the bottom of your flow.
 
Click into the compose box to customize your bot's call to action!


Here's what our bot's message looks like when we type "test" into our testing environment:

After the bot sends the relevant articles, it asks "Did this help?" with thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. If the site visitor clicks thumbs up or types "yes," the bot will respond and then move on through your flow.

If someone clicks the thumbs down or says "no," the bot responds "Sorry about that" and then proceed through your set flow.
 
For those who are more visual, here's the full design flow! 

Article Lookup within Welcome Messages

You can also use Article Lookup within Welcome Messages! The search functionality is the same, but the flow is a bit different.

If someone clicks the thumbs down or says "no," the bot responds "Sorry about that. If you have another question, I'd love to help."

From here, customers can select "Human Please" to route the conversation to a human, or they can type another question and the bot will once again search for helpful articles based off the query.
Within the Welcome Message specifically, the bot will loop indefinitely until a customer clicks the "Human please!" button.
The copy of the Article Lookup skill within the Welcome Message Playbook is hard-coded and can not be altered.

Enabling the Article Lookup with the Welcome Message can be done here. For more information on the Welcome Message Playbook click here .

Help: Article Lookup Integrations

The Article Lookup skill works with articles hosted on Zendesk, HelpScout, Wordpress, and HelpDocs. You can connect one of these external document management services via our knowledge base integration here .

Help: Ticket Creation

Help: Ticket Creation enables your users to create a support ticket right within your ticketing system.

Your bot will ask visitors for their email address, if you don't have it already, then give them the opportunity to provide a brief description of their issue. They can then add additional information or even change the subject of the ticket! Once they're satisfied with the content, they receive a bot response that someone from your team will follow up by email! 

Within the Visual Builder of your Bot Playbook, adding Ticket Creation will insert a node where you can edit the bot's call to action just like Article Lookup.

Here's the full flow!

For our users integrated with Zendesk, tickets will be created as internal notes so that when you respond, customers will not see the content of the ticket or the conversation that they created within your Drift account. 

What is Added in Zendesk

You will see the following information in Zendesk once your ticket has been created:

• Email of requester
• Name of requester
• Ticket subject
• Ticket comments
• Conversation tags
• Zendesk Group ID

Assignee ID (the agent that created the ticket)

Help: Ticket Creation Integrations

Ticket Creation works with any ticketing platform.

You can connect to Zendesk by selecting them from the dropdown in Bot settings, hitting "Connect", and then entering your organization's domain name in the knowledge base integrations page after starting the connection flow. If you have previously connected to Zendesk you may see a "Reconnect" button which will allow you to reconnect to your Zendesk account so that the bot can now create tickets in addition to looking up articles.

 

To connect to all other ticketing platforms we utilize email forwarding. To use email, just select it from the dropdown and provide your organization's support email. This works with Salesforce, Jira, Freshdesk, Intercom, and all known ticketing platforms. You can use an email provided by these systems or an email address from your own organization. 

Email forwarding will only work with an email account associated to your organization or with a known ticketing platform.

A valid email domain should match at least one of the following:

• The domain of your organizations website (found under [Settings](https://app.drift.com/settings2/company))
• The domain of a drift user listed within your organization’s manage teammates settings. This can be found under Settings > Manage Teammates.
• The following common ticketing domains:
  • case.salesforce.com 
  • zendesk.com
  • reshdesk.com
  •  inbound.intercom-mail.com
  •  helpscout.net
  • zohodesk.com
  • tickets.livechatinc.com
  • happyfox.com
  •  hiverhq.com
  • .helpshift.com
  • robot.zapier.com
  • hs-inbox.com
  • atlassian.net
• 

You can also use ticketing inside of a Welcome Message by checking the box at the bottom of these settings. The bot will then automatically ask visitors for their email information, if it doesn't have that already, and then ask if them about their issue to create a ticket. This will apply after Article Lookup in the Welcome Message if Article Lookup is turned on

Help: Article Lookup and Ticket Creation

Help: Article Lookup and Ticket Creation is an all-in-one capability to handle 100% of support questions. It will allow you to handle both serving up your help documentation and creating support tickets directly within your Bot flow.

 

And....here's the design flow!

 

Global Bot Responses

If you have multiple playbooks using the article look up or ticket creation skill and want to have the same copy for every playbook you can use global bot responses. Navigate to the Playbooks tab and click "Global bot responses".

Click into the skill you would like to edit the responses for and be sure to click "save" when you're done. Please note that any changes made to a skill here will take affect in every playbook that uses the skill you edited.

Enable the Bot to Automate Your Support

Now that we've covered what the bot can do, let's get started!

For users on the Pro plan and above, simply navigate to Settings > App Settings > Bot or click here. Scroll down to "Help - Article Lookup and Ticket Creation," then connect your knowledge base to enable Article Lookup and either connect to Zendesk or give Drift your support email to enable Ticket Creation!

For users on the Essential plan, head to Drift Help > Settings > Article Lookup or click here!

Things to Note - Warning Messages

If you are building a ``bot Playbook, but haven't yet enabled Help: Article Lookup and Ticket Creation within your Bot settings, you'll see a warning message when you try to add them in the builder. No worries, you can just click on the warning message to go to your Bot settings and turn them on! Or, click here!