Overview

Mature support organizations often receive thousands of support tickets per week ranging from extremely simplistic to extremely complicated.  The core use-case of Solve Email is to deflect as many incoming tickets as possible by responding to the customer with the correct macro or knowledge base article.

Forethought excels at automating email responses beyond human accuracy levels. To achieve this, a custom model is trained on your historical ticket data. When using macros, this assumes that your agents have been responding to customers with macros for long enough and with enough volume for the automation to be feasible and relevant.

Technical Overview

This article will guide you through setting-up your Zendesk Instance for Solve Email.

Pre-requisites: If you are a new customer, make sure to have completed the Zendesk: Before you install guide. 

The general flow is the following:

1. The ticket is created in Zendesk
2. A Zendesk trigger will detect this, and trigger the Notify Forethought Webhook
3. The Zendesk webhook will send ticket information to Forethought
4. Forethought Solve will make a prediction and respond to the end user by adding a new comment to the ticket
5. The Dashboard will then provide insights on the accuracy of the response by keeping track of the number of times Solve responded to a ticket and whether that ticket was re-opened or not

Zendesk Configurations:

1. Create trigger or automation to track Solve reopens

Trigger

Conditions

• Tags contains at least one of agatha-automated

• Tags contains none of agatha-reopened

• Status changed to Open

Actions

• Add tags: agatha-reopened

Automation

Conditions

• Ticket: Tags contains at least one of agatha-automated

• Ticket: Tags contains none of agatha-reopened

• Ticket: Status is Open

• Ticket: Hours since open greater than 1 (or whatever timeframe you prefer)

Actions

• Ticket: Add tags = agatha-reopened

2. Ensure Pending tickets will eventually be marked as Solved automatically

Most Zendesk instances have triggers or automations that will ensure a ticket left in Pending status will be changed to Solved status after a certain timeframe or after certain conditions are met.  This function is required for Solve Email's analytics to function properly.

If you already have an active trigger or automation that takes care of this, you're all set!  But if you don't have something like this, you'll need to set that up. Here are a couple examples of what that may look like.

Automation

Conditions

• Ticket: Tags contains at least one of agatha-automated

• Ticket: Tags contains none of agatha-closed

• Ticket: Status is Pending

• Ticket: Hours since pending greater than 1 (or whatever the customer prefers)

Actions

• Ticket: Status = Solved

• Ticket: Add tags = agatha-closed

Trigger

Conditions

• Tags contains at least one of agatha-automated

• Status is Pending

• Reopens less than 1

Actions

• Status = Solved

3. Not solved button reopen 

If you are using the Forethought Solve Email button functionality on ticket creating this trigger is a requirement for action to occur when a user hits "No, this was not helpful" button on their automated email response. For most we want the ticket to automatically be reopen when a response given is unhelpful so that it can be readdressed with an agent. 

• Tagscontains at least one ofagatha-automated
• Tagscontains at least one of agatha-not-solved
• Tagscontains none ofagatha-reopened

• UpdateStatus  toOpen
• Ticket: Add tags = agatha-reopened
• Reassign Group ID or Assign ID to blank

4. Notify Forethought

Once you are done with the initial set-up, please notify your Forethought team to let us know you have set up the required triggers/automations.

 5. Model Training & Observation Phase

Now that you are set-up, your Forethought team will train an AI model, learning from your historical ticket data. After the model is deployed, every time a ticket is sent to Forethought, if the model is sufficiently confident, Solve will respond with the most relevant content based on the ticket's subject and description.

After a response is sent, the ticket will be tagged with agatha-automated. Should your customer respond to Forethought's deflection email, the trigger created in step 1 will tag the ticket with agatha-reopened and Forethought will note that this deflection attempt was unsuccessful.  Your Forethought dashboard will display the model's performance based on the number of successful and unsuccessful deflection attempts.

Enhanced Solve Email:

For implementations centered around Forethought's enhanced email product, a different set of triggers will be necessary to support Solve Email service within your Zendesk. The triggers will manage tickets in various parts of the deflection lifecycle and route them into a specific status depending on how a user interacts with our deflection message.

Forethought responds to a ticket with an attempted deflection:

When Forethought sends out a deflection, we send out a message that aims to address a user's question and add the tag ft-email-automated to the ticket. In these cases, because Forethought has responded to a user, it's necessary to move these tickets out of the New or Open status to allow for agents to prioritize tickets that haven't yet been addressed. 

• Evaluates the ticket on ticket update
• Tagscontain ft-email-automated
• Tagsdoes not containft-email-responded

• UpdateStatus  toPending
• Ticket: Add tags = ft-email-responded

User acknowledges a deflection as being helpful:

After Forethought sends a deflection, users can clarify that the deflection resolved their issue and allow a ticket to be resolved and moved to the Solved status. 

• Evaluates the ticket on ticket update
• Tagscontain ft-email-positive-feedback
• Tagsdoes not containft-email-solved

• UpdateStatus  to Solved
• Ticket: Add tags = ft-email-solved

User acknowledges a deflection as being not helpful:

After Forethought sends a deflection, users can clarify that the deflection did not resolve their issue and require further support. These tickets must be moved back to agent queues by setting the ticket to an Open status.

• Evaluates the ticket on ticket update
• Tagscontain ft-email-negative-feedback
• Tagsdoes not containft-email-not-solved

• UpdateStatus  to Open
• Ticket: Add tags = ft-email-not-solved

(Optional) Make it so your automated "We received your ticket" message is only sent when Forethought does not respond as to avoid sending users 2 consecutive emails:

Many of our customers integrate an automated message that gets sent out as soon as a user creates a ticket that confirms to the user that you've received their ticket and that they should expect a reply soon. Because Solve Email can act as a first touch point and send out a deflection that aims to resolve a user's question, it can be unnecessary to send both the deflection and the automated message. As such, it can be valuable to make it so your automated message is sent only in cases where Forethought does not send a deflection.

To update this:

• Find the trigger in your Zendesk that sends out the automated email
• These triggers will often operate during ticket creation. Because Forethought receives and processes these tickets after they're created, we'll need to move this trigger to operate on ticket updates.
• Because we only want to send this email once and under specific conditions, we'll need to add the following logic:

• Evaluates the ticket on ticket update
• Tagscontain ft-email-not-automated
• Tagsdoes not containft-email-automessage-sent

• Ticket: Add tags = ft-email-automessage-sent