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Answer Bot by Zendesk — Machine learning designed for customer service
Answer Bot is built into Zendesk Guide and uses machine learning to respond to customer questions with content from your knowledge base. As the tickets come in, Answer Bot learns which help article is best suited to answer specific questions. It’s designed to provide answers to simple support inquiries, like those concerning product specs, order statuses, and subscription changes.
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G’day hunters! Mike here from the Zendesk Product team down in Melbourne, Australia. I’m really excited to share Answer Bot with this community today. Over the last year, we’ve been building Answer Bot to improve the experience for your customers by automatically responding to their questions with relevant knowledge base content. For simple questions, customers now get relevant answers faster, freeing up your support team to answer the more nuanced questions that need that human touch.
What makes Answer Bot awesome?
1. It works wherever your customers are: Answer Bot already works across several channels including email and API which typically don’t have great automated self service experiences. We’re also extending Answer Bot to create new in-channel experiences for web form, web widget, chat, and our SDKs in the near future.
2. Activate and go: We’ve removed the complexity to make it as easy as possible for anyone to start using Answer Bot straight away. No training time or massive data sets needed. (You’re wondering how? Because it’s trained on over 12 million customer service interactions to deliver accurate and reliable responses. And it’ll continue to learn and grow.)
3. Learns from customers and agents: Interactions between Answer Bot and your customers are clearly presented to your support team, allowing them to see the actions customers have taken to avoid suggesting the same content again. Your support team can also provide pointers to Answer Bot to help it learn over time.
4. Optimize performance with reporting: Generate amazing insights into where Answer Bot performs well and where you may need to create or improve your self-service content.
If you’re already a Zendesk customer using Support and Guide, you can start a free 30-day trial right now. If you’re new to Zendesk, you can easily start a Zendesk trial, create some content, and test it out too! :)
For more info, head to www.zendesk.com/answer-bot.
@mikmortimer Your prices are outrageous 1€ per resolution!!!!! We have 100 tickets per day, the price by month will be around 500 € just for a bot. Seriously you should rely change your pricing. I will be willing to pay 30€ / Month for this feature but not more. Make some changes you are getting too expensive, I use Zendesk since 5 years I'm rely thinking about moving to another platform
@clement_peltier Hey Clément, thanks for the feedback. I think there may be some confusion - with Answer Bot, only questions that are solved by Answer Bot are counted towards your subscription limit, which is based on $1 per successful resolution. We've done a lot of research to benchmark the cost to solve a question, by a human representative, at an average of $4. So Answer Bot should represent great value!
@mikmortimer @clement_peltier I agree about pricing , it is too high and disagree of average cost of $4.
@mikmortimer @dainiskanopa Zendesk now only wants big corporations that don't really care about the pricing. You don't care any much about Small Start-up or small companies. I don't know what you are doing on ProductHunt. Release your product directly on linkedin.
I have two small companies, if we implement a solution like your bot, it's to take care of a lot of similar requests (60% of our requests are the same). So I'm going to pay a lot for this bot (not only 30$ per months but more around 200€/month). So your pricing is really going crazy. I understand that you need to make money, but stop increasing the price everywhere 6 months.
For the record, your product "Guide", which is a knowledge base, you charge it now 15€ / user / Month. It was included in the support before !!!
I'm very frustrated because I implemented Zendesk when the pricing was correct. I still pay 25$/month/user for the Pro (which include Support & Guide). If I was a new client today I will pay 49€ + 15€ / user/month. See???
You are losing all the small companies with this prices, but I guess it's your strategy. It's a shame that you are on producthunt today, to release a bot that we were waiting for months and that you want to charge by resolution, seriously !!!
@mikmortimer @dainiskanopa @clement_peltier Hey Clement, thanks for posting. When we designed Answer Bot, we wanted to align the value you receive with what you pay, regardless of whether you're a big or small company. In this case, we want to help you successfully solve customer questions. We used our data to understand how long it takes our customers to solve a question in a single response — on average 12 minutes. It seemed fair that the bulk of those savings go to you and we get a cut for saving you time and giving your customers a better experience. That said, you have a better understanding of how much time Answer Bot will save you. It would be great to know what sort of pricing makes sense for startups like yours. I'm based in Montpellier and travel to Paris often. Give the free trial a shot and I'll DM you to connect.
If I get enough up-votes I will build you all a free (or extremely cheap *) alternative that does exactly the same thing. The ball in in your court.
* Rates around 10$ per million tickets.
@robertpieta -Great, we can join forces now. I will be needing someone to help and take care of the mobile apps. ;)
@robertpieta @aichholzer 💰 -> 👄 How many? We can have a good ol' fashion bot off.
@channelthetiger -Not sure I understand what you mean, this must have been your bot doing the talking. 😵
@aichholzer Sorry, I didn't get that. Please choose from one of the following options. 🤖
🙄
@channelthetiger -This is getting confusing now. Which one didn't you get, my reply or your bot's reply to my initial message? -Let's raise a ticket and see how the bot finds an answer for it. 🤓
There's no doubt Zendesk makes excellent software, but the pricing is outrageous.
I have a small Zendesk contact widget on my site, costs me €60 + VAT per year which is how much the cheapest plan costs (Essential plan). I didn't mind, but then, days into the subscription, a customer wanted to use it to let me know about a bug, but he couldn't even attach a screenshot because apparently the cheapest plan only supports attachments that are up to 1MB in size.
tl;dr kthxbye
@ninoskopac 😖 We don't get it right all the time. I'll follow up with the team on the attachment size limits on Support Essential. Would love for you to be able to use it. Re: Answer Bot. Give it a shot for 30 days, then reach about the pricing. If it doesn't seem worth it, I'd love to know about it.
@channelthetiger
> Would love for you to be able to use it.
Yes, me too :)
RE: Answer Bot, I actually love talking to my customers myself, at least for now, while the volume is low, but I'll keep it in mind for the future.
@ninoskopac shouldn't ever get in the way of that, but we all have to sleep sometimes 😜
I see where you're coming from with the pricing you've entered at. And honestly, I believe that many companies will be willing to pay this-- especially ones that already trust Zendesk.
In fact, even as an SMB owner, I am tempted to start this very soon. I really see the value in eliminating necessary time from employees as I scale. If this can help supplement a support team and eventually even let me hire 1 less employee, the cost the can be saved on hiring/training alone is immense.
Thanks as always, Zendesk! You guys rock!
@dustin_mccaffree Thanks Dustin! Let us know how it goes when you get started
Seen a few startups trying to start this, but I guess it was only a matter of time before the big players made it a feature. The real question is – will users like this more or less?
@jgage718 We've been monitoring satisfaction surveys for Answer Bot vs human resolved issues and we're seeing similar ratings. More benchmarking to come.
@channelthetiger great to hear – sounds like you guys really have it all thought out! If this can help customers resolve issues faster and ease the workload on companies – we're in a good place
@channelthetiger @jgage718 Thanks Justin, appreciate the feedback - definitely going to make for some interesting benchmark studies to come
We've been an Answer Bot beta tester for a while now and have been impressed! It doesn't always get the right answer, but it's right often enough and it's very smooth and seamless for users. We definitely think we've gotten value out of it.
That said, now that we're going to have to pay $1/answer, we're likely to discontinue the service. Looking at our history of successfully bot-answered support questions, it will cost us more per month than we currently pay for all of our agents combined, which is very high for us. And given Answer Bot tends to only answer questions that are relatively easy, that humans could answer with Zendesk's built-in macros in a few seconds, rather than the harder-to-answer back and forth questions that take humans a long time, the value of Answer Bot's answers is lessened, and can't be directly compared to humans, since it only answers the easy ones.
Great product, truly. Pricing is a problem. If it were a set monthly price we'd be more likely to go through with it, but not being able to budget makes things hard too.
@j_ro hey Jason, just in terms of predictability and budgeting: Answer Bot is sold in set packages starting from $50 a month (for 50 resolutions) - and when you hit your limit it'll simply just stop suggesting articles on new incoming requests (the auto-response will still be sent though). This might help with budgeting as it's a set monthly subscription with a limit? Regarding the $1 / $4 though, that's fair and I think different customers will have different costs profiles - we tried to get as fair a baseline as we could by looking only at one-touch tickets when calculating the $4 benchmark average.
Really cool offering! I was concerned with the pricing along with many of the folks on here. Seems to me you might have to present users with a tool to compare current CS cost per resolutions vs w/ your product. One question I had reading #3 in your comment - Where does the machine learning fit in? Seems like the system is reporting user behavior and it is the CS agents manipulating which suggested answers to show and when. Thanks!
Cool stuff Mike! In my mind, I see this less as a bot or conversational assistant and more like a knowledge base product if that makes sense. Yours is a service geared more towards self service - i.e. "what article will help me solve my own issues" vs. "I'd love for someone to help me find out how much I spent last month". Both have their place for sure.
@dawooditech that's a reasonable distinction - we see so much value in the content assets that customers have already created, sometimes it's just about helping connect the dots better 👍
Maybe this isn't ok to say, but its quite easy to build a bot these days based on a knowledge base. You can use something like Textbox (https://blog.machinebox.io/incre...) to search the KB and respond with the 'answers'. The nice thing about proper NLP is that if someone searches for "frog" you get results with "toad" since its semantically not as far apart as "frog" and "car".
The real value in bots is the knowledge itself, and the relevance of its response.
Too all my supporters and up-voters; I have started working on this, keep an eye open folks, coming soon. -All up-voters will get a free lifetime license, just for believing in me and because this is how we roll.
This is a useful to have it in place inside Chat, Contact form and customers who're reaching the help desk via email. Answer bot will recommend articles based on the keywords on your question and suggest you
This looks like a great way to introduce an FAQ onto a site in the form of chat communication. But don't you have stiff competition from the likes of Intercom?
@theashtube +1 for chat/messaging. Also, we're excited about bringing a modern customer experience to email — still the most used channel. Answer Bot gives SMTP some much-needed immediacy with relevant content suggested instantly, an embedded feedback experience on web/mobile, and tracking on what the customer viewed, voted, etc for the agent. Intercom and Zendesk are both focusing here because it will make for a better CX.
Is this what Uber uses to get you an instantaneous reply to customer service inquiries?
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