Generative email replies for AI Agents Advanced in Zendesk

When you say "ticket deflection" or "self service" most people automatically think: chatbot or help center. Conversational agents or articles on your help center are indeed two of the easiest ways to allow customers to find answers to their questions without the need of a human agent.

But one of the biggest support channels, email, does not have that built-in luxury of being able to deflect tickets. Emails reach your Zendesk instance before you've got the chance to deflect it.

Traditionally Zendesk has offered their Answer Bot and auto reply feature as a way to offer some kind of self service to customers. Once enabled customers get up to three support articles linked in the confirmation email of their submitted ticket.

Customers can click on the links and figure out a solution based on the article.
You can also tweak the trigger to also include the entire content of the first article in the email.

{{ticket.comments_formatted}}
{% if answer_bot.article_count > 0 %} 
    {{answer_bot.article_list}}
    {{answer_bot.first_article_body}}
{% endif %}

It's a nice solution, but have a few downsides. Customers need to either click the links to read articles (and optionally then also click to mark the question as solved), or they get a potentially giant block of text in their inbox that might answer their question. It's a solid solution, but in a world powered by generative text, we can now do better.
And this is exactly where the new generative replies for email agents comes in.

Previously AI Agents Advanced (Ultimate) could only reply with predefined responses based on specific use cases. If customers inquired about order information you could send out an email with instructions, and include links to specific webpages or articles.

This did require you to create a response for every use case you want to handle, which does not scale well. But with the release of generative replies for email, your AI Agent can now reply with custom replies directly to your customer.
Similar to how a chatbot replies with an answer, you can now automatically reply to the customer and offer an answer inline with info pulled from your help center or other knowledge sources.