Instant Answers lets an AI assistant reply to a brand-new ticket immediately, using only the help articles you provide — many customers get answered (and can close their own ticket) before an agent ever sees it. A real agent still receives every ticket regardless.
This page is owner-only: admins and agents don’t see the AI section in Settings.
Turn on Instant Answers
- Click the gear (Settings) icon, then click AI in the left-hand nav.
- Click the Instant answers sub-tab at the top of the page.
- Instant Answers needs two things before it can turn on: an AI provider connected under AI features (see “Connect an AI provider”), and at least one article in your help library (see “Write knowledge base articles for Instant Answers”). If either is missing, the page tells you what to add first and the toggle stays off.
- Once both are in place, check Turn on instant answers for new tickets.
How it replies
On each new ticket, Essential Support first checks whether the customer’s message plausibly matches any of your help articles — a free keyword check, with no AI call and no cost, if nothing plausible turns up. Only when there’s a plausible match does it call your connected AI provider, which is instructed to answer using only the matched articles and to decline rather than guess.
The reply is posted as an “Automated answer” from “AI Assistant” — not from a named agent — and ends with a reassurance line naming your configured follow-up time (and your support hours, if set), so the customer knows a real person will follow up if the answer didn’t fully help.
Under the answer, the customer sees two buttons: Yes, this solved it — close and No, keep it open. Clicking the first closes the ticket immediately, recorded as a self-close, with no agent involvement. Clicking the second dismisses the buttons and leaves the ticket open in your queue like any other.
Response-time promise
- Under Response-time promise, set Follow-up time (for example, “1 business day”) — this is the text used in the reassurance line above.
- If you’ve set specific days and times under Settings → Tickets → Availability, Instant Answers automatically includes them in that line; otherwise no schedule is mentioned. Click Edit in Availability to change them.
- Click Save.
Monthly budget
- Under Monthly budget, set Monthly cap (USD) — a safety cap on AI spend for Instant Answers only, from 1 to 100. It defaults to $5.
- Click Save.
- When the month’s cap is reached, Instant Answers pauses until the next month — tickets still reach your team as normal, just without an automated reply. A banner on this page shows the pause and the cap; you can raise the cap at any time to resume immediately.
- The line below the cap shows this month’s running total: amount spent, how many tickets were answered, how many were served from cache (no new AI call), and how many were skipped with no AI call at all (no plausible article match).
Test before you rely on it
- Under Step 3 — Try it, type a sample question into the box and click Try it.
- You’ll see one of: an answer preview with which article(s) matched, a message that no help article matched (no AI call would be made), or that the assistant declined to answer from your content. This doesn’t create a real ticket.
Privacy: when Instant Answers is on, the customer’s opening message is sent to your selected AI provider to compose the answer. Where semantic (smart) matching is available on your platform, the question text is also sent separately to OpenAI to generate a search embedding, regardless of which provider you use to answer — a note about this appears on the page only when it applies. It stays entirely off until you check the toggle above.
Edge cases
- Emptying your whole help library (clicking Remove all articles) turns Instant Answers off automatically, since it would have nothing to answer from.
- If your AI provider’s key is removed after Instant Answers was turned on, new tickets stop getting automated answers even though the toggle may still show as checked.