Zendesk helps companies deliver great experiences — whether helping companies supporting employees at workplace or during customer service, one has to just experience the magic behind Zendesk. Customers rely on Zendesk to create and manage tickets, deliver omni-channel experience and help agents get task done quickly.

But what if I told you can automate your channel interactions using Zendesk Chatbot? Yes, you can.

Zendesk Chatbot is an AI powered Zendesk which helps companies auto-resolve 80% of customer/employee issues within seconds. Using Zendesk chatbot, companies benefit by automating repetitive issues, save costs, reduce time to resolution, deliver faster support and more.

Zendesk chatbots use Natural Language Processing to understand a user’s intention or utterances for initiating a conversation with it as well as to extract required data from a user’s query and pass it to the automation to resolve the user’s issue in real-time. So, think of how intelligent chatbots work, but with Zendesk chatbot, it can not only have those benefits, but also extend the functionalities of Zendesk tool using advanced integration and workflows

A Zendesk chatbot can be quite helpful not just for your users but also for the agents as it helps automate user interactions on repetitive tasks and helps your team focus on more important and complex tasks that require human touch.

We have compiled a list of most repetitive tasks that you can automate using Zendesk chatbot:

• Adding a New Zendesk Ticket

• Creating a Zendesk Support Ticket

• Deleting a Zendesk Ticket

• Removing a Zendesk User

• Updating a Zendesk User’s Details

• Retrieving a Zendesk Ticket’s Details

• Updating a Zendesk Ticket’s Details

• Access Management

• Asset Requests

• Unlock Account

• Password Resets 

• User Provisioning 

• Employee Onboarding 

• Employee Offboarding

A. Customers and users get faster responses and issue resolutions

Customer experience long wait times with traditional customer support, but AI can take on common, simple, repetitive customer questions or requests much faster and able to solve 80% of the issues in seconds. So having a Zendesk chatbot can boost your mean time to respond and resolve by 5x.

B. Automate repetitive work

One of the most repetitive issues or requests coming to your help desk team are related to access. Companies use IAM tool to record employee details, login and manage access credentials to make accessibility easier for your employees be it access to their laptops/desktops or apps. There are a bunch of IAM offering online like JumpCloud, Active Directory, OneLogin, Okta, Auth0, Office365, etc.,

So what exactly happens when your employee gets locked out of her/his laptop/desktop or forgets the password to their work email?

Your employee will have to contact the help desk team or raise a ticket on Zendesk, which again goes through the vicious cycle of your employee waiting for a long time for a help desk agent to take over their issue and solve it for them which in turn leads to frustration and loss in productivity for both the employee as well as the help desk agent. Since unlocking an account or resetting a password comes under repetitive tasks, why not automate them and let your employees resolve these issues themselves, freeing up your help desk agents to focus on complex issues? How you ask? That’s where Zendesk Chatbots comes in.

C. Modern self-service

In case an employee in your organization is facing an issue with their system, be it in terms of software or hardware that requires human intervention in person, instead of calling up the help desk and waiting for someone to answer their call, they can just open their Slack or Microsoft Teams app on their mobile phone and chat with the Zendesk chatbot to create a service request or resolve the issue on their own. Thus giving employees the seamless self-service support experience they deserve.

D. Free up your IT or HR staff with workflow automation 

Why just stop with freeing up your IT staff alone by getting the repetitive tasks off their hands with Zendesk chatbots? You can even ease the workload on your HR with HR worflow automation using Zendesk Chatbot.

No more requiring employees to contact your HR to know leave types or leaves available or making your employees go through the hassle of logging in to the HRMS portal and navigating through the portal’s labyrinthine menus to find what they are looking for. Using Zendesk chatbot on your business’ Slack or Microsoft Teams workspace, you can let your employees take care of all HR-related queries on their own, while they are on the road. 

E. Increased employee productivity 

High volume support ticket can put a huge pressure and burden on your support agents leaving them with big pile of open tickets to resolve. Tickets that are repetitive in nature can eat up your agent's time. For instance, a query like a password reset requires a particular flow of steps. Therefore, Zendesk Chatbot help in faster resolution for this type of tickets.

This gives both agents employees a better experience and more time to do productive work instead of back-and-forth calls and emails to help desk.

we have compiled a list of popular platforms to help you build your Zendesk chatbot

• Netomi - chatbot platform that helps you automate your conversations

• Workativ Assistant – no code platform with both chatbot and workflow automation tools. Pricing starts at $299 monthly.

• Reply.ai

• Aivo

Companies that are using Chatbot for Automated Workflows

Since pandemic, several businesses around the world are now looking toward Intelligent Automation – the most advanced type of automation wherein AI-based contextual chatbots with automated workflows support customers and employees by resolving their support issues in an instant, on-the-go, conversationally. Let’s take a look at some of the businesses that have achieved this and more. 

1. JobAdder 

JobAdder, a company offering recruitment software, has significantly sped up the recruitment and hiring processes in their company via automation due to the speed at which processes can be approved back and forth. 

JobAdder team has also been able to completely eliminate “old school” communication hardware, such as fax machines, scanners, and printers. Tasks that were previously paper-based have been digitized, improving efficiency across the board. 

2. Instacart 

Instacart, a grocery delivery, and pick-up service offering company were able to dramatically simplify the personal shopper onboarding process via automation. New applicants initiate the workflow by filling in basic information, such as name, email address, home address, etc.  The applicant’s information then automatically populates duplicate fields across all the onboarding forms, significantly reducing the amount of information applicants must enter.

And the entire process easily takes place on a mobile device.

How to Build Zendesk Chatbot Without coding

a) Zendesk + Workativ Assistant — What it means for you 

Workativ Assistant is a no-code conversational ai platform that also offers workflow automation. “so what, it’s just another PaaS on the market that requires heavy lifting from our side to get it up and going,” you might say. But that’s where workativ differentiates itself. Workativ Assistant is a no-code platform that lets you build and set up domain-specific chatbots with app workflows on your Slack or Microsoft Teams workspace in just a few hours, enabling seamless self-service for your employees and help desk agents, increasing their productivity and getting you the best ROI on your workplace support. let’s take a look at how to build Zendesk Chatbot using workativ.

b) Steps to build Zendesk Chatbot

Here are the key parts to build your Zendesk chatbot. The main parts are

• Creating a bot workspace

• Creating Zendesk workflows or use prebuilt from marketplace

• Creating dialogs or conversations for chatbot

• Deploying on slack or teams channel

Step 1. Creating a bot workspace

When you sign up for workativ assistant, you’ll be required to name your workspace. You can call it HR Bot, or IT Bot, or just pick something like ‘EDITH’.

Step 2. Adding collaborators to the workspace

It’s best to have a group of people collaborating on creating new conversation/dialog flows or automations for a chatbot or to optimize existing dialogs and automations. Workativ assistant enables this by allowing you to invite users to the workspace via email.

Step 3. Naming your bot

Before creating dialog or topics for your chatbot and for Zendesk automation, you’ll need to name your bot.

So that’s all there is to the initial set up of your workspace. Next, let’s move on to building dialog and setting up Zendesk workflows. 

Step 4. Setting up a Zendesk automation for the chatbot

Before we building dialogs, lets setup Zendesk create ticket workflow so we can use this workflow in our chatbot whilst building dialogs. Zendesk ticket

You’ll just have to start by specifying the inputs required from the user for the automation to execute tasks in the first step. 

Then you’ll have to select the Zendesk action that you want to automate on the action panel in Step-2. In this example, we use create support ticket workflow action.

Then you’ll have to connect to your Zendesk account on the actions panel by entering the Zendesk domain URL, username, and password. 

And you’re set. 

You can even club Zendesk with your other 3rd party business applications for the real-time resolution of an issue (as in the example below, the case of unlocking an account in Azure AD and then creating a ticket in Zendesk ticketing system)

Now that we have setup our workflow. Let's move to building dialogs or conversations.

Step 5. Setting up a conversation/dialog flow for the chatbot 

Creating a dialog for the chatbot using workativ’s chatbot builder is easy.

You’ll just have to specify the user phrases that the chatbot, upon detection on the user’s query, should execute the dialog for (User’s Intention). Then you can set up the conversation flow accordingly based on the inputs you require from the user.

After setting up the dialog by mapping the relevant automation to it, you can test the whole setup using the Try Me option on Workativ Assistant.

Step 6. Launching the chatbot in chat channels 

After checking whether everything is working as it’s supposed to, you can then add the chatbot to your Microsoft Teams or Slack workspace for your employees to self-serve their IT issues, on-the-go, in an instant. 

c) best practises on creating an engaging chatbot 

Now that we’ve seen how to build your Zendesk chatbot using workativ, below are some of the things you should do to create an engaging conversational experience for a user with the chatbot. 

• Create the conversation based on user stories — Always structure the conversation/dialog flow based on what and how the user expects the chatbot to solve her/his query. 

• Test-run with internal control groups — Testing whether the conversation that you created for the chatbot sounds friendly and natural with a select group of employees first enables you to optimize the conversation further for an engaging support experience for employees. 

Since you have reached the conclusion, you must be clear by now that building a Zendesk chatbot is quite easy and you also deploy your chatbot on Slack or MS Teams. It is found that 70% of users prefer using slack for reporting their support issues. And while it's great for people to interact, having a Zendesk chatbot can really transform workplace support by automating both interactions and as well workflows.

With the AI powered no-code platforms like workativ assistant, you can supercharge your Zendesk investments with a Zendesk chatbot. Bringing together Workativ Assistant, Zendesk, and other third-party tools makes your BOT no less than a SUPER-BOT. Power-packed and Smart!

Can’t wait to transform your IT Helpdesk with Zendesk Chatbot? Get in touch with and we’d be more than happy to give you a demo.