Integrating Alhena AI With Zendesk
Alhena can work with your existing Zendesk helpdesk and seamlessly integrate into your existing workflows. It can respond to website chat, email, and Whatsapp, passing on to a human when needed.
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Alhena can work with your existing Zendesk helpdesk and seamlessly integrate into your existing workflows. It can respond to website chat, email, and Whatsapp, passing on to a human when needed.
Last updated
You can configure Alhena AI to start responding to your Zendesk tickets by enabling the integration from the Alhena dashboard. From the Settings page, click on integrations, and then click the toggle next to Zendesk to get started.
When you set up the Zendesk integration, Alhena will create a new agent in Zendesk called "Alhena Bot". The bot will only respond to open tickets that are assigned to this agent.
Once Alhena answers the ticket, it will move it back into the closed status. Zendesk automatically moves tickets back to the open status when a customer replies, and then Alhena will reply again.
In order to have Alhena automatically respond to your tickets, you can use triggers to automatically assign new tickets to Alhena Bot.
See this example of configuring Zendesk to assign all new email tickets to Alhena.
Alhena will stop responding to users and transfer the query to a human for a few different scenarios:
The user asks for a human agent, i.e. they type "I want to talk to a person" or something similar.
The bot wasn't able to find an answer in its knowledge base.
A custom rule you've added in the answering guidelines for your bot was triggered.
By default, Alhena will unassign the ticket from itself in case of human transfer. If you would like the ticket to be assigned to a specific group for your human agents, reach out to our team for assistance.
Human agents can also manually respond to tickets from within Zendesk or reassign them away from Alhena Bot, and the bot will stop responding.
These guidelines apply to all sources (Email, Website, and Whatsapp).
Alhena can automatically respond to tickets in Zendesk created by email. For each new message in a ticket, Alhena will generate a new answer, transferring the ticket to a human agent when needed.
There are some additional human transfer rules for email tickets:
An email that we suspect is from an automated system was assigned to the bot.
An email with "Fwd:" in the subject line.
Once your configure your Zendesk integration, Alhena will start syncing conversations from the Website SDK into Zendesk. You can see the conversations users are having with the bot in realtime from Zendesk. When a human is needed, the ticket will be transferred as described above.
When a ticket is transferred to human agents, the bot will ask users for the email address.
Users can upload images and files for human agents to see from the website SDK, and agents can send images and files back to the user.
If you have Whatsapp configured in Zendesk, Alhena can respond to any tickets created through this channel. To enable this, you'll need to have access to the Sunshine Conversations API through the Zendesk Suite Professional plan or higher.
First, make sure you've configured the Zendesk Integration with the instructions above.
From the Zendesk integration page in the Alhena dashboard, enabled the WhatsApp integration.
Click on "Create An API Key", or navigate to the Conversations API page in the Zendesk admin panel under "Apps and integrations."
Now click "Create API Key" in the Zendesk admin panel. You'll be prompted to name your API key. You can name it "Alhena AI" or anything you'd like.
Copy each of the three values from Zendesk's admin panel into Alhena's dashboard.
Click "Connect" in Alhena's dashboard. Your bot will now start automatically replying to any tickets assigned to the "Alhena Bot" agent.
You will most likely want to set up a trigger in Zendesk to automatically assign tickets to the bot. See these instructions for more information.
A user sends a message to your Whatsapp number, and a new ticket is created in Zendesk.
There will be some delay before Alhena starts processing the ticket. Due to Zendesk limitations, it may take a couple of minutes before we receive the data.
We wait until the message is at least 30 seconds old to start processing, since Whatsapp users may type multiple messages in a row, and may need some time to attach images.
Alhena will process the messages and images it received as if they were sent together and generate an answer.
If you have created multiple bot profiles for your organization in Alhena, you can have tickets from the same Zendesk account routed to the appropriate bot profile. For example, you have multiple products or websites where the tickets go to the same Zendesk account.
Reach out to Alhena support and we can configure this mapping. For common Zendesk configurations, like multiple email addresses or multiple Whatsapp numbers, we have support for mapping these sources to different bot profiles.
If you found a ticket in your Zendesk account where the bot gave a wrong answer, you can use the ticket ID to search in Alhena's dashboard, where you'll see the answer sources used. You can then check your provided documentation for any incorrect or outdated information, or provide feedback to the bot.
First, find the ticket ID in Zendesk
Now you can enter this ticket ID into the search box on Alhena, where you'll be able to locate the ticket and see the answer sources. You can also search by any text in the messages, phone number, or email address.
From there, you can either open links to the information Alhena used to generate the answer, edit existing feedback used, or add new feedback.
For more information on giving feedback to the bot, see this article.
Yes, Alhena can be trained on past Zendesk ticket responses. Please reach out to our team for assistance if you would like this.
Yes, Alhena can be trained on Zendesk macros. Please reach out to our team for assistance if you would like this.
