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Get started with email

Do your customers prefer to communicate via email? You can configure your AI Agent to reply to their emails, serving information from your knowledge base and connecting with your business systems to resolve their inquiries.

Overview​

Your customers can start a conversation with your AI Agent by writing an email to your chosen support address (new or existing, e.g., [email protected]). They can then converse back and forth with your AI Agent to get their issues resolved.

Your AI Agent uses all of the content you've configured in Ada to automatically resolve your customers' inquiries, and writes longer messages that are appropriate in email but not, for example, in web chat. It uses the subject of the email to add context to the customer's inquiry, and can address multiple inquiries in a single email.

If your AI Agent can't resolve the customer's issue, it forwards the conversation to your support team, who can then assist using the agent platform you already have in place.

Like all conversations your AI Agent has, you can audit its email conversations, and then provide Guidance to coach and improve the way it interacts with your customers, and its ability to resolve customer issues.

Messages and conversations​

Email conversations work a bit differently from other channels in your AI Agent.

Message structure​

Over email, your AI Agent's messages always include:

  • A salutation (a greeting and the customer's first name)

  • A sign-off (a closing and the AI Agent's name)

    note

    If you don't have an AI Agent name configured, the AI Agent will default to signing off with "Ada Bot" as its name.

  • Any links displayed as hyperlinks

If you wish to make changes to the salutation or sign-off, or make other refinements to email content, use Guidance with availability rules set to email only. Additionally, you can customize your emails with headers and footers.

Conversation threading​

Your AI Agent automatically replies to every email it receives, to ensure that 100% of your customer's inquiries get a response. If your support team needs to send and receive emails to and from customers, without your AI Agent sending replies, we recommend using a separate email address.

Each email thread is treated as a separate conversation in Ada, so it's possible for a customer to have multiple simultaneous email threads with the AI agent. After 72 hours of inactivity from the customer in an email thread, your AI Agent considers the conversation to be over. If a customer sends a message after this period of inactivity, your AI Agent treats that inquiry as a new question, and create a new conversation for it.

After 72 hours of inactivity, your AI Agent will also analyze the conversation to determine whether it was automatically resolved.

Security and spam handling​

  • Data storage and security
    • To learn about how Ada protects your data, see our Trust Center.
  • Spam
    • To have the most control over your email security, we recommend using our bring your own domain feature. That way, you can filter out spam using your mail provider's existing settings, before forwarding them to Ada.
    • Ada doesn't currently provide spam filtering.

Limitations​

  • Email is currently not HIPAA eligible.
  • Your AI Agent ignores CC and BCC email addresses. It only sends replies to the From email address in the original message.
  • The Capture block is currently not supported for the Email channel.
  • Because all email conversations start with customer messages, content in your Greeting doesn't appear in email conversations.
  • Your AI Agent can only reply from one email address. For example, if you have both [email protected] and [email protected], you will need to decide which email address is associated with your AI agent.

Quick summary: Set up email​

Setting up email in your AI Agent consists of a few steps:

  1. Set up your AI Agent's content. Configure your knowledge base, Guidance, Processes, Actions, availability rules, CSAT preferences, etc. If you already have other channels set up, you can skip this step.

    For more information, see the topics in the Set up your AI Agent's knowledge and behavior section of the Help Docs. Those topics take you through preparing and uploading your knowledge base content to your AI Agent, then customizing its behavior for any situations you need your AI Agent to handle with specific actions or content.

  2. Activate email. Activating email doesn't mean launching it right away - you just need to turn it on to start configuring it.

  3. Set up a handoff. Handoffs to your support team work a little differently from other channels. Take some time to configure at least one handoff, so you can pass both conversations and attachments to your support team.

  4. Test. Test your configurations with your Ada-provisioned email address, and fine tune them as necessary.

  5. Implement and launch your email channel. When you're ready to go go live and have your AI Agent respond to customers, choose your method of implementation (bring your own domain, forwarding, API, or a combination of methods), and set it up.

    tip

    If you want to control which emails get passed to your AI Agent, you can use your existing email provider to create forwarding rules after you have your custom email address set up.

  6. Audit and coach. As your AI Agent has conversations over email with your customers, keep an eye on how they go, and continue to coach your AI Agent to improve its performance.

    On the Ada dashboard, you can go to the Conversations page to view all of your AI Agent's conversations, then apply a filter so it only displays email conversations for your review.

Configure email in your AI Agent​

Activate email​

On the Ada dashboard, go to Channels > Email. On the Configuration tab, click Activate Email.

note

Activation can take around 10 seconds to complete.

Test your email configurations​

You can send emails to your AI Agent's Ada email to carry out your internal testing. You can start sending test emails to this email address to get a feel for how your AI Agent will handle inquiries as long as a knowledge base is set up for your AI Agent to access.

While this email address is useful for testing, we strongly recommend against exposing it to your customers. Instead, we recommend using our bring your own domain feature, either using an existing support email or creating a new one.

Want to further refine how your AI Agent is responding to your customers? You can fine tune how the AI Agent responds using dashboard functionality like creating Guidance, and customize your emails with your company's branding.

Have any questions? Contact your Ada team, or email us at .