How to Integrate AI With Your Email Inbox

Hi there, welcome to Kommunicate.

My name is Manab, and I’m a Product Marketing Manager here at Kommunicate.

Today, I’m going to show you how to integrate Kommunicate AI with your email inbox so you can automate repetitive queries and give more time back to your support team to focus on complex issues.

To begin, you’ll need a Kommunicate account. You can sign up by visiting our website. There is a 30-day free trial available to get started.

On the screen, you can see the Kommunicate dashboard.

The first thing we need to do is create a bot.

On the left-hand panel, click Bot Integrations. Under Bot Integrations, click Create New Bot.

For this demonstration, I’m going to use Kompose, which is Kommunicate’s own NLP-powered bot.

I’m going to name this bot Email AI Bot and click Save and Proceed.

There are different languages that you can train the bot on, but we’ll skip that for this demonstration.

Now, click Finish Bot Setup.

The bot has been created.

Next, the bot needs to be trained on something.

In Kommunicate, you can train the bot on documents, website URLs, or your knowledge base. You can also integrate Zendesk or Salesforce help center articles directly into Kommunicate, so the bot can train on them without you doing the heavy lifting.

For this demonstration, we are going to train the bot on our own website, kommunicate.io.

The bot will take around 30 to 40 seconds to train itself. The larger the website, the more time it may take. For us, the website has 102 pages, so it should not take more than a minute.

While the bot is being trained, we’ll go to the left-hand panel and click Integrations.

Under Integrations, click Email Tickets.

Here, you’ll see the mailbox section. This is where you can connect the mailbox you want your bot to respond from.

For this demonstration, I’m going to use my Kommunicate work email address.

After entering the email address, click Save.

Just below that, you’ll see a unique identifier email address. Copy this email address.

Next, go to your email settings.

This could be your Zendesk or Freshdesk email ticketing system. Since I’m using my own email for this demonstration, I’ll go to Gmail Workspace.

Click Settings, then click See All Settings.

Go to Forwarding and POP/IMAP, then click Add a Forwarding Address.

Paste the unique email address you copied from the Kommunicate dashboard and click Next.

The system will ask you to confirm that this is you. In some organizations, this may require email address confirmation. You may receive a prompt saying that you are forwarding your email to the Kommunicate dashboard.

Once the forwarding address is confirmed, select the option to forward a copy of incoming emails to the new email address you just added.

Then, click Save Changes.

Now, we have created a bot and integrated Kommunicate with our email address.

Next, let’s go back and check if the bot is ready.

Go to Bot Integrations and open the bot we created, Email AI Bot.

Under URLs, we can see that the bot has been trained and is active. It has trained on 102 pages.

The final step is to go back to Settings.

In the bottom-left corner, click Settings, then click Conversations.

Under Conversations, go to Rules.

Scroll down and look for the section called Assign Conversations Based on Channels.

Kommunicate supports different channels, such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, website chat, and email. In this case, we are working with an email bot.

Select the email address that we just integrated and assign it to the Email AI Bot that we trained on our website.

Now we are done.

This is all it takes to integrate your Gmail inbox. For Freshdesk or Zendesk, there may be a few additional steps.

Next, let’s test it.

I have created a dummy account called John Doe using a Gmail address.

We’ll send an email from John Doe to the email address that we integrated with the Email AI Bot.

Let’s ask a pricing question.

The email says:

Hi team, what is Kommunicate’s pricing?

Best regards,  

John

Now, I’ll send this email.

Here is how it works.

When someone sends an email, it first goes to the email address we connected. In this case, it goes to my work email inbox.

Then, the same email is forwarded to the Kommunicate dashboard.

As you can see, the email has landed in my inbox. This could also be your Zendesk or Freshdesk ticketing system.

Now, the same email conversation is forwarded to the Kommunicate dashboard.

Inside the Kommunicate dashboard, the bot has already responded.

If I go back to John Doe’s email inbox, I can see the bot’s reply.

What you just saw is that we created a bot, trained it on a website, and the bot instantly responded to the email.

The bot replied with Kommunicate’s pricing information and also included a source link, so the user can verify that the information is correct.

Now, what happens if the customer continues the conversation?

Let’s reply:

Thank you for that information. Does Kommunicate have iOS SDK integration?

Best,  

John

Here, we want to check whether the bot can understand that this is the same person and continue the conversation within the same email thread.

Again, the reply first comes to our inbox, and then the same email is forwarded to the Kommunicate dashboard.

As you can see, the bot has replied to the follow-up question.

Now, let’s check how it looks from John’s side.

The first question was:

Hi team, what is Kommunicate’s pricing?

The bot responded with pricing information and a link.

Then, John asked another question in the same thread, and the bot understood that this was the same person and continued the conversation on the same email thread.

The bot replied:

Hi John, yes, Kommunicate has iOS SDK integration available. You can easily integrate it with your application. If you need more information, connect with us.

Now, what happens if you want to take over the conversation from the bot and hand it over to a human support agent?

You can use the Take Over From Bot option.

I’ll click it here.

Now, the conversation has been assigned to me.

If you have multiple support agents, you can assign the conversation to any available agent using the Assign option.

Since this is a dummy account, it is just me for now.

Now, I can reply as a human agent:

Hi John, this is Manav here. Are you looking to purchase Kommunicate? I can help you with the iOS SDK integration.

Thanks.

Previously, every conversation reply was handled by the bot we created. But now, a human agent has taken over the conversation.

This solves a major problem in support inboxes today, where agents spend time manually answering repetitive queries.

With Kommunicate AI, you can automate those repetitive queries. And whenever a specific query needs human attention, a support agent can step in.

Try Kommunicate with a 30-day free trial, or feel free to book a demo with us.

We are happy to help and look forward to working with you.

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