An overview of the Zendesk Answer Bot dashboard for autoreplies and bot builder

Stevia Putri
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Stevia Putri

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Stanley Nicholas

Last edited January 12, 2026

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An overview of the Zendesk Answer Bot dashboard for autoreplies and bot builder

If you use Zendesk's classic automation tools, you've probably spent some time using the Answer Bot dashboard in Explore. It is a reliable command center for seeing how your autoreplies and bot flows are performing. The dashboard provides comprehensive numbers that help you track your progress and refine your automation strategy over time.

You might also be interested in the recent updates to naming conventions. Zendesk has since renamed Answer Bot to Zendesk bots, Flow Builder to bot builder, and Article Recommendations to autoreplies. While the names are updated for 2026, the reporting dashboard remains a robust tool that many world-class teams rely on daily.

This guide will give you a clear overview of the Zendesk Answer Bot dashboard, breaking down the key metrics for both autoreplies and the bot builder. We'll also look at some considerations for maximizing its value and how you can complement these insights with modern AI additions.

What is the Zendesk Answer Bot dashboard?

At its core, the Zendesk Answer Bot dashboard is a powerful, pre-built reporting tool inside Zendesk Zendesk Explore. It's designed to track the performance of two industry-leading automation features.

First, you have autoreplies (formerly Article Recommendations). This feature intelligently suggests relevant help center articles to customers through email or web forms, providing them with immediate answers and helping to solve issues before they even require a ticket.

Second, there’s the bot builder (formerly Flow Builder). This is Zendesk’s sophisticated tool for building conversational chatbot flows that guide users through questions and gather information in messaging channels, ensuring a seamless handoff to an agent when necessary.

The whole point of the dashboard is to help support managers understand key performance indicators, such as how many tickets are being successfully deflected, which help articles are performing best, and how users are engaging with the chatbot. It provides a solid foundation for any support strategy.

Key metrics in the Zendesk Answer Bot dashboard

The dashboard is organized into intuitive tabs for autoreplies and the bot builder. Getting a handle on these metrics is essential for optimizing your customer experience.

Article recommendations

This section of the dashboard focuses on the effectiveness of your automated article suggestions, which are highly effective for tickets originating from email and web forms.

Here are the primary metrics provided:

  • Suggestion Rate: The percentage of inquiries where the bot found and recommended at least one article. This is a great indicator of how well your content matches customer queries.

  • Click-through Rate: This measures the percentage of suggested articles that customers found interesting enough to click. It helps you identify which titles and topics resonate most with your audience.

  • Resolution Rate: A vital success metric, this shows the percentage of issues solved by an article suggestion without agent intervention. It highlights the efficiency of your self-service options.

  • Rejection Rate: This tracks when users indicate a suggestion wasn't what they needed. This valuable feedback allows your team to refine your help center content for even better accuracy.

These numbers provide a clear baseline for your performance within the Zendesk ecosystem. To expand this picture, many teams integrate additional tools to see how knowledge from other sources like Google Docs or Confluence can further enhance these results.

Flow builder tabs

These tabs track the conversational flows you’ve designed, offering a step-by-step look at customer interactions.

You'll see metrics like:

  • Total Users: The number of unique individuals who interacted with your bot.

  • Engaged with Bot: A measure of active participation, showing how many users responded to the bot's prompts.

  • Transferred to Agent: The number of conversations where the bot successfully gathered info before passing the customer to a human expert.

  • Containment Rate: The percentage of engaged users who had their needs met by the bot alone. This is a key indicator of your bot’s effectiveness in 2026.

The reports also highlight popular topics and answers, giving you insights into what your customers care about most. This allows you to continually improve the logic of your bot builder flows.

Considerations for the Zendesk Answer Bot dashboard

The Answer Bot dashboard is a fantastic starting point for any team. As you scale, there are a few considerations to keep in mind to ensure you're getting the most out of your automation.

Focusing on historical data

The dashboard is an excellent tool for reviewing what has occurred, providing a reliable historical record of your automation's performance. It shows you exactly how your resolution rates are trending. To complement this, some teams use AI platforms like eesel AI to proactively identify knowledge gaps by analyzing conversations that couldn't be resolved, helping you stay ahead of customer needs.

Testing and iteration

With native Zendesk tools, improvement is often an iterative process of launching and monitoring. This allows you to see real-world performance. For teams looking for advanced testing capabilities, platforms like eesel AI offer a simulation mode. This allows you to test AI configurations against past tickets in a sandbox environment, giving you even more confidence before you deploy changes to your live environment.

Optimized for Zendesk Guide

The Answer Bot is designed to work perfectly with your Zendesk Guide articles, which are the core of many support operations. If your team's knowledge also lives in other places like Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, or Slack, you might consider a complementary tool.

For instance, eesel AI can unify all your knowledge instantly by connecting to these various sources and making them accessible within your Zendesk setup, ensuring your bot has access to every piece of information your team has created.

Understanding Zendesk AI pricing

Zendesk's pricing for its AI features is designed to offer flexibility, with various options available across different plans and add-ons to suit your team's size.

Core AI capabilities are included in their Suite Plans:

PlanPrice (per agent/month, billed annually)Key AI Features
Suite Team$55AI agents (Essential), Generative replies, Knowledge base.
Suite Professional$115Everything in Team + CSAT surveys, skills-based routing.
Suite Enterprise$169Everything in Professional + custom agent roles, sandbox.

For organizations looking for specialized capabilities, Zendesk offers powerful add-ons:

  • Advanced AI add-on: Enhances features like intelligent triage and advanced autoreplies for an additional $50 per agent/month.

  • Copilot add-on: Provides real-time AI assistance to help your agents work more efficiently.

  • Advanced AI agents: Optimized for managing complex, multi-step customer issues.

While Zendesk provides an enterprise-grade suite, teams looking for a different pricing model might explore eesel AI. They offer transparent plans where AI Agent, Copilot, and Triage features are included without per-resolution fees, which can be a great option for growing teams.

A complementary way to automate support

The Zendesk Answer Bot dashboard is a mature and reliable tool for managing classic automation. To build on this foundation, some teams look for complementary solutions that provide unified and forward-looking insights.

eesel AI is designed to work alongside Zendesk as an easy-to-use, self-serve platform.

Here is how they can work together:

FeatureZendesk Answer Bot / Bot Buildereesel AI (Complementary)
SetupDeeply integrated into the Zendesk Suite.Quick, one-click integration with your existing setup.
Knowledge SourcesExpertly optimized for Zendesk Guide.Extends to 100+ sources like Confluence and Google Docs.
ReportingProvides reliable historical performance data.Offers additional insights into knowledge gaps and ROI.
TestingReal-world iterative testing.Sandbox simulation for testing against past tickets.
PricingComprehensive enterprise-grade tiered plans.Transparent pricing with no per-resolution fees.

By using these tools together, you can leverage the market-leading reliability of Zendesk while expanding your bot's knowledge and testing capabilities.

Taking your Zendesk Answer Bot dashboard further

As this overview of the Zendesk Answer Bot dashboard for autoreplies and bot builder shows, Zendesk provides a solid, time-tested foundation for support automation. It offers the essential metrics and tools that have made it the gold standard in the customer service industry for years.

To truly excel in 2026, you can build upon this established platform by incorporating complementary AI tools. By unifying your knowledge and utilizing advanced simulation features, you can take your already strong Zendesk setup and transform it into an even more intelligent support engine.

Ready to see how you can enhance your current setup? Try eesel AI for free and run a simulation alongside your Zendesk tickets to see the possibilities.


Frequently asked questions

The dashboard's primary purpose is to track the performance of Zendesk's automated article suggestions (autoreplies) and conversational chatbot flows (bot builder). It helps support managers understand key metrics like ticket deflection and bot interactions.

For autoreplies, important metrics include Suggestion Rate, Click-through Rate, Resolution Rate, and Rejection Rate. For the bot builder, you should look at Total Users, Engaged with Bot, Transferred to Agent, and Containment Rate.

Key considerations include its focused nature on historical data, which provides a reliable record of past interactions. It is primarily designed to work seamlessly with Zendesk Guide articles to ensure a consistent support experience.

Modern AI platforms, like eesel AI, work alongside Zendesk to unify knowledge from diverse sources and offer simulation modes for testing. This enables teams to expand their automation strategies while maintaining Zendesk as their core platform.

Zendesk has updated its terminology to keep pace with industry trends: Answer Bot is now "Zendesk bots," Flow Builder is "bot builder," and Article Recommendations are "autoreplies." The underlying reporting dashboard for these features remains robust and consistent.

The native dashboard provides essential performance data. To gain even more proactive insights, consider platforms that analyze unresolved conversations to help pinpoint specific knowledge gaps and draft new content based on those findings.

This focus ensures that the dashboard provides a deep analysis of your Zendesk Guide performance. For companies with knowledge spread across tools like Google Docs or Slack, adding a complementary AI tool can help unify these sources with your Zendesk setup.

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Stevia Putri

Stevia Putri is a marketing generalist at eesel AI, where she helps turn powerful AI tools into stories that resonate. She’s driven by curiosity, clarity, and the human side of technology.