Knowledge base deflection in email

Last Update: Sep 2024 • Est. Read Time: 3 MIN
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 With knowledge base email deflection, you can set up an auto response message that acknowledges receipt of a customer's email, and also recommends up to 3 articles that can help answer their question without them having to wait for an agent reply. This can help encourage your customers to self serve and solve their own support request, allowing your agents to focus on more urgent matters.

Who can access this feature?
User typesContent administrators can access knowledge base settings. Admins can create business rules.


In this article

Set up your auto response email

Using a business rule template, you can quickly set up your auto response email with email deflection.

Note: If your Kustomer org is multilingual, make sure your NLP workflow is setting the Lang. value on conversations. For more information, see Automatic Language Detection.

To set up your auto response email:

  1. Go to Settings> Platform > Business Rules.
  2. Select the Acknowledgement auto-response template.
  3. Edit the name of the template to help you distinguish it from other auto reply templates. For this example, we will name it Auto response with deflection.
  4. In the Set Actions section, select the email address the response will come from using the From drop-down menu.
  5. Optionally, if you have a specific template you want to use, select it from the Email Template drop-down menu. 
  6. Edit the message body, as needed. 
  7. Select Snippets & Dynamic Text and then select the Dynamic Text tab. 
  8. Add the {{kbarticle.deflection.actions}}  field to your message. Using this field will reply to the sender with 3 suggested articles that match their inquiry. Each suggested article will ask the sender if the article was helpful and have an action to close the request.
  9. In the message body, select {{kbarticle.deflection.actions}} and enter fallback text. This will be what is rendered in the auto response email if there are no articles found that match their inquiry. For example, you can enter "We're sorry, no articles were found."

  10. Select Save Changes.
  11. Make sure the business rule is enabled by turning on the toggle, if not already enabled.

Agents can see the articles that were presented to the customer in the email conversation and whether or not the deflection was successful. Articles shown with a blue icon indicate that the article was read.

Update your theme files

If you are using a custom theme for your knowledge base, you need to update your theme files in order to use email deflection.

Note: If you are using the default theme, you do not need to follow these steps. The files will be automatically updated with these changes.

To update your custom article.jsx file:

  1. Go to Settings> Knowledge Base > Themes.
  2. Select the custom theme you are using with your knowledge base.
  3. Select your custom article.jsx file.
  4. Copy and save all of the code from your article.jsx file into a text editor.
  5. Return to the Themes page and select the Default Theme.
  6. Select the article.jsx file in the Default Theme and copy all of the code from this file.
  7. Return to your custom theme and select the article.jsx file.
  8. Select and delete all of the code in your custom article.jsx file. 
  9. Then, paste all of the code you just copied from the default theme into your file.
  10. Now, copy all of your original code from the text editor (step 5).
  11. Find the line of code for return and paste all of the code you just copied from the text editor after  return (.

    Note: In this image, you can find return ( on line 99. This may not be the same in your custom file. Also, please note that you are replacing the code that currently comes after return( with the code you just copied from the text editor.


  12. Finally, find the </main> line and enter this line before it:
    {this.renderDeflectionPrompt()}
    Your file should resemble the following:
  13. Select Save.


To update your custom form.css file:

  1. In your custom theme, select form.css.
  2. Copy and paste the following block of code in your file:
    /*  ==============================
      Deflection
      ==============================
    */
    .form-deflection-prompt-container {
      position: fixed;
      display: flex;
      justify-content: center;
      align-items: center;
      bottom: 0;
      left: 0;
      right: 0;
      border: solid 1px #dbdadf;
      background-color: #f9fafc;
      padding: 15px;
      font-size: 16px;
    }
    .form-deflection-prompt-text {
        margin-right: 40px;
    }
    .form-modal-success-icon,
    .form-deflection-success-icon {
        display: flex;
      justify-content: center;
      color: #80ce69;
      font-size: 30px;
    }
    .form-deflection-item-article-cta-button {
      font-size: 16px;
      padding: 10px 30px;
      border-radius: 3px;
      background-color: #2e96cd;
      color: white;
    }
    .form-deflection-item-article-cta-button:hover {
      cursor: pointer;
    }
  3. Select Save.

Now, if a customer sends an email and it matches any of your knowledge base articles, the auto response they receive will also include articles that can help answer their question faster.