Smart Reply is an intelligent tool that helps your support agents respond to customer questions quickly and accurately. It can be trained on all your business policies and product information and understands important context like customer information, order tracking, and more. By giving instant, relevant answers, Smart Reply saves time and improves customer satisfaction.

In this guide, we will talk you through what Smart Reply will mean for your business and how to set it up in your eDesk account.

Before you start

  • Smart Reply is part of the AI Assist add-on. To learn more, click here. 
  • Once you have the AI Assist add-on, all users, except read-only users, will have access to the Smart Reply feature.
  • You'll need to have a Content hub set up so Smart Reply can reference the articles in there.
  • You'll need to have Instructions linked to your Content hub and to the channel(s) the Smart Reply will be answering tickets on.
  • You’ll need to have access to Settings > AI > Instructions if you want to add Instructions for your Content hub.
  • If you don’t have access, you can request it from an Admin user within your business. 

Key benefits of AI Assist

With Smart Reply, your support team can:

  • Improve response times: Quickly resolve customer inquiries with pre-generated responses.
  • Enhance accuracy: Deliver consistent and accurate answers based on the latest information from your company’s knowledge base, blogs and websites.
  • Reduce workload: Streamline the support process, allowing agents to handle more tickets with less effort.

01 How Does Smart Reply Work?

The tone of voice, directions on how to reply to customers and your company's backstory for the Smart Reply are all set within your Instructions. 

To ensure Smart Reply functions correctly, you'll need to link your Instructions to both the relevant Content hub(s) and the channel(s) where you want Smart Reply to be active. If a channel isn't selected in your Instructions, Smart Reply won't follow those guidelines or use any Content hub information when replying for that channel.

We have provided 'Sample Instructions' with your account by default. To find about more and how to set up your own Instructions from scratch, click here. 

Smart Reply is trained using order information and your Content hub to deliver responses tailored to your business. We've pre-loaded 8 common ‘Sample Policies’ into your Content hub, but please review them to ensure they align with your company's specific policies.

To view these sample policies go to: Settings > AI > Content hub > click on the name of the 'Sample policies' library  > click on the name of a policy to view the text.  As this is a custom answer, you can click on the name of an article and edit this as you wish. To see our guide with all the text in the Sample Policies, click here. 
There are 3 ways to add content to your Content hub.
  • Add each page of your website individually.
  • Add a Knowledge base.
  • Add custom answers.
Note: If you have a sitemap on your website, you can ask us to import that for you. This will save you having to add each external website link individually. 

You can add as many articles as you want to your Content hub. To add additional content to the Sample Policies library, simply go to: Settings > AI > Content hub > click on the ‘Sample Policies’ library that is populated there > Click ‘Add content’.

The 8 articles in the ‘Sample Policies’ library are a good start, but the more content you add, the better Smart Reply will be trained to handle your customer queries effectively!

You can also create your own library from scratch.

To read more about building a Content hub, click here. 

02 How to use Smart Reply in eDesk

Using Smart Reply is easy! Simply click into the ticket and choose from one of the three core features to help handle your customer inquiry:

  • Prompt: When a customer sends in a support ticket, the Smart Reply Prompt analyzes the content and presents multiple suggestions for resolving the issue. Your agents can click on a suggestion to generate a personalized response, speeding up the resolution process. 
  • Write with AI (from scratch): With just one click, Smart reply can generate a complete, ready-to-send response to a customer query. This feature is ideal for handling routine questions like order status updates or return policies - details of which would be in the order information or your Content hub. Just click into the reply box and without typing anything, click on the AI button. 
  • Enhance with AI (using agent prompt): Agents can type specific questions or instructions into the reply box and then hit the Enhance with AI button. This is especially useful for unique or complex situations where the information in your Content hub might not suffice.

In the above example, the seller wants to include information about their cancellation policy in the message, so they type that into the Reply box. The AI symbol changes to 'Enhance with AI' as soon as something has been typed. Below are the results:
Note on translation: All AI responses are generated in the Agent's Preferred Language, as set in their Profile Preferences. This ensures the Agent can fully understand the AI's draft. The Agent can then review and edit the response before sending. If the customer's message is in a different language than the Agent's Preferred Language, once the Agent hits Send, they will be prompted to translate the reply into the customer's language.
03 Finding the source of the Smart Reply
For all responses that the AI generates, you can view the source from where the AI pulled the information by hovering over 'Sources' at the bottom of the Reply box. 

The titles of the articles that the AI used will show. You can then search for these in the Content hub if you need to refine them or make any changes. 

04 Providing feedback for the Smart Reply

Users can provide feedback to the eDesk team on the replies generated by Smart Reply before the agent sends the response. Our Product team closely monitors this feedback and uses it as a key metric to assess the feature's performance. While there is currently no report available in eDesk for users to view this feedback, detailed reporting is coming soon.

And that’s it! Once your Content Hub is filled with valuable information and your Instructions are linked to both the Content Hub and the channels, Smart Reply will take care of the heavy lifting in responding to customer queries, allowing you to focus on what matters most!

Further readings

To read more about building a Content hub, click here. 
To read more about AI Instructions, click here. 
For more on creating great custom content, click here. 
For a full overview of our Chatbot for your live chat, click here.