How to create an auto reply for Facebook
I saw lately a couple of posts here that people are looking for a auto-reply function for the connected Facebook pages.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/226599587
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/203597387
I've set this up for our account last month and will share it with you ... and yes, i am also interested in the Zendesk Swag offered in the january e-mail
I will try to explain as simple as possible, if you need it more detailed please comment. But enough talked, let's start :)
Why I've implemented it?
We have around 3k tickets per month in our company, approx. 10% of them are via Facebook Messenger Channel. At a certain point this were simply too much tickets each month, which have not the same customer service experience as over the E-Mail or Help-Center channel, where we've set up dozens of automated service e-mails.
I think especially for Facebook messages, this missing feature is very critical for Zendesk, since customers expect an answer within minutes not hours.
Implementation
In fact it just consists of 2 parts:
- Trigger for determining when it should be sent
- Extension for posting a public reply
Trigger
Conditions
- Integration Account:Choose yourFacebook page(watch out if you are using global pages, they have all the same name!)
- Ticket Is: of course onlycreatedwhen we are dealing with an auto-response
- Tags: just in case i am adding a tag to prevent multiple auto-replies, since I remember a service outage where Facebook messages got fetched dozens of times.
- Requester Tractive:This is a user flag I've added to all the "Users" of our Facebook pages (Every Facebook page has a user in Zendesk, which is used when you write a customer first, or somebody is replying via business manager), so that a message created from ort marketing team e.g. reply to a post with a PM does also not get an auto-reply.
Actions
- Before sending the message, I am checking if the tag is not set already, to prevent duplicate messages as written before
- I am using my Extension to update the ticket with a public reply.
Extension
This extension will update the ticket itself via an API call. I know this is not the proper way according to Zendesk documentation, however i saw plenty of forum posts which are using this for example to write internal notes from triggers.
Url:
https://YOUR.zendesk.com/api/v2/tickets/{{ticket.id}}.json?ticket[comment][public]=true
Attribute Name:
ticket[comment][body]
Basic Authentication
Username: e-mail address + "/token"
Password: create an API token in your settings
Voila, after you made this everything should work.
I hope i could help you a little bit, in case there is something not understandable or missing please let me know
Andreas
PS: In addition to the nice auto replies you have, the facebook page you manage will also get the very responsive badge quickly :)
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Thanks, Andreas! This worked perfectly for us.
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Hi Dennis,
thanks for getting back to me, I am happy that you could achieve what you wanted. In case you've implemented some additional features, feel free to share with us here to make this article even better! :)
Best,
Andreas -
Thanks for sharing your tip, Andreas.
And you already have one happy customer. Nice work. :)
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Many thanks for taking the time to share what you know, Andreas! We haven't set up auto-response for Facebook yet. Seeing what you've done here, I'd like to have this implemented ASAP.
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Hi Mike,
thanks for your thoughts about my implementation.
I would love to your feedback as soon you've implemented it.
Best,
Andreas -
Hello Andreas,
这看起来不错,但我这nk Zendesk has changed UI and the screenshot seems to old which doesn't apply anymore.
Can you help me apply it to my account or do a video around the same? Will be really helpful.
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Hey Sachin -
Welcome to the Zendesk Community! Hopefully Andreas will weigh in soon. :)
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If you are looking for an Auto Responder for your Personal Facebook Messages, I have developed an open-source app just for that. Visithttps://faceply.ioto download it. Or check out the source code onhttps://github.com/romankisil/Faceply.io
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Thanks Andreas, this really saved me! :)
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Hey Guys,
Just dropping this here :), I created an article which shows you how to enable auto replies within the settings of your Page on Facebook for those not aware of this possible option:
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Hi all,
I changed my employer last autumn, that's why I don't have access anymore to the account I created this article with.
@Sachin
In case this is still relevant, please post your questions here.
@Yanick
I'm not aware of any delays, as soon the ticket is fetched and replied in your Zendesk, it should also update on Facebook. Is it still persistent?
@Vladan
Always nice to hear that my solution could help a community moderator :)
@Claudia
Your solution of course also works, but there are several reasons why I think my solution could be the preferred one especially when using Zendesk.
- An auto-reply set up in Facebook is considered as public comment in Zendesk, this can mess with your triggers.
- My implementation can get you the responsive badge very quickly, while the official Facebook responder does not count towards that metric.
- You can populate the content based on information in Zendesk e.g. Out of office hours, holidays.Hope I did not miss anything, I'm very happy to see that this solution is still in use and helpful to other people.
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Hey @Andreas,
Totally get your point :) there are some customers who do not have complicated workflows, so they don't take those points into account.I just posted my solution for those who are looking for a simple auto reply and they are not aware of that option existing on Facebook.
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Hey @Andreas,
Like Sachin, I would like an updated version to the post since the UI has changed so much. Not seeing the option to add a public reply under Actions and would love to implement this for our business.
Any assistance would be great!
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Hi @Andreas,
Kelsa我有同样的问题。外接程序后g the URL target, I am not seeing the option to add a public reply. Can you help us please?
Thanks!! -
Thanks @Andreas! I'm trying to create the extension, but I think something is wrong with the URL. I'm getting the attached error. Any ideas?
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Hey Dion,
It may help to provide a screenshot of the target you've set up on your end so users can take a look. I'm rather limited on what I can assist with on my end but some additional information may help other users :)
Cheers!
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Hi@...,
Thanks your article save my day :)
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Hi @andreas and thank you so much for the detailed guide!
I'm having a problem with the SLA because of the auto replay implantation
my SLA was 4 hours for the first replay and 4 hours for the second replay,
since the implantation the auto replay "count" as a first replay
the SLA "first replay" is shot when the auto replay shot instead of my agent first respond.
Any creative idea?
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Hey Helen,
It may be worth excluding Facebook tickets from your SLA policies as a whole so they don't skew your FRT metrics.
You could create a trigger that tags all Facebook tickets and set up your SLA policy to only apply to tickets that do not contain that tag.
When updating your policy, there should be aTags > Contains none of the following > (tag)condition.
I hope this helps!
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Hi Brett, thank for the quick answer,
truth is - most of my tickets come from facebook so I need a solution for those kinds of tickets
any other idea?
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Hey Helen,
The only other suggestion I have is updating your auto-reply trigger to add another tag that you can use to exclude these particular Facebook tickets from your SLA. I'm afraid there's no alternative solution as a first reply time metric can only be met from a manual response from the agent.
Perhaps someone else can jump in here and offer up an alternative solution for you.
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Hi Helen,
The "auto-reply" is basically a public agent reply via the Zendesk API, that's why it is also the correct behavior that the SLA fires.
As mentioned by Brett I recommend you to add a tag to exclude such tickets with a facebook auto reply from your SLAs. This does not work however with the URL target below since Tags need to be set with a separate API call.
The easiest solution (but costly) would be to use a separate account for this auto-reply, and then you can set a tag with a trigger when this account replies to a ticket.
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Thank you guys for the suggestions,
I think I have no choice but to do the auto replay from Facebook itself
The Facebook SLA is too important from being ignored
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This worked perfectly for me as well ! Thank you !
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Hey @Andreas
This article really a big help.
Just want to clarify if this target action is only applicable in a Trigger?
Because I tried it in an Automation and it did not fire. So what I did was a combination of automation (setup a tag) & trigger (validate the tag then execute ng target action).
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Hi Donald,
Thank you for reaching out. Automation is possible for this workaround. For example, if you add a tag to a user or organization, that tag will be added to any tickets where that user is the requester. But It may help to provide more information on the tag. I'm rather limited on what I can assist with on my end.
Alternatively, I can create another ticket if you are to provide more specific information.
Cheers,
Blanca | Customer AdvocateChat with our live support!
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Hi Blanca,
Appreciate your feedback. It worked after some revision on the conditions of my automation. I just noticed that sometimes it took more than an hour or two from the scheduled notification to notify end-user. There's also this on instance of having multiple actions in one automation together with this target, when it was executed the target notification to facebook did not fire but the others were ok.
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Hi, I got this error after several successful fired actions via the automation.
{ "error": "APIRateLimitExceeded", "description": "Ticket update API threshold exceeded" }有人知道怎么解决或预防using this use case?
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Hi Donald,
For your question re: automation, it runs on a ticket once an hour, unlike the trigger that is being applied immediately. Concerning multiple actions in one automation, it depends on the conditions that were set. It is highly recommended to use automation to set up a workflow that applies automatic updates to tickets based on time. I can proceed to create a ticket if you wish to discuss the sample ticket.
As for the error message, it means that the limit exceeded is 30 updates per 10 minutes per user per ticket. Here'sAPI Rate Limitsfor your reference.
Please let me know how do you want to proceed with the automation settings.
Cheers,
Blanca | Customer AdvocateChat with our live support!
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Hi there,
We have recently learned that the triggered that is going out to our Users via the mobile SDK is considered as a first public response and this has skewed our first response time data drastically.
Just wondering anyone from the community has any suggestions on the work around as we are not able to exclude those tickets as suggested in this thread.
THANK YOU IN ADVANCE!
Pleasesign into leave a comment.
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