Improving topic quality with personalized recommendations

Intelligent triageleverages AI to automatically classify incoming tickets by topic, language, and sentiment. The Zendesk Topic Model includes pre-trained topics across several industries, providing relevant topics and use cases tailored to your account's ticket data.


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Summary: ◀▼
Use personalized topic recommendations to improve topic quality and keep intelligent triage accurate. You can review new topic suggestions based on your ticket data, accept them to expand coverage, or decline them with feedback. You can also fix duplicate or overlapping topics to reduce conflicts and improve ticket classification.





Intelligent triage classifications are available on Suite and Support Professional plans and above. Using them in workflows requires the Copilot add-on.
Intelligent triage leverages AI to automatically classify
incoming tickets by topic, language, and sentiment. The Zendesk Topic Model includes
pre-trained topics across several industries, providing relevant topics and use cases
tailored to your account's ticket data.
Intelligent triage makes proactive recommendations to help you monitor the quality of
your topics. When gaps are identified in your topic coverage, you'll see recommendations
for new topics. Additionally, whenever you create, modify, or deactivate a topic,
intelligent triage analyzes your account and identifies any duplicate or overlapping
topics.
This article contains the following topics:

About topic recommendations
Reviewing topic recommendations
Resolving topic conflicts

Related articles:


Automatically classifying tickets with
intelligent triage

Accessing and viewing intelligent triage
topics



About topic recommendations

A topic is how intelligent triage classifies what a ticket is about. When you
activate intelligent triage, your account includes a prebuilt list of topics
specific to your industry.
For example, if a customer submits a ticket saying that the item they ordered arrived
damaged, then intelligent triage may automatically classify the ticket with a topic
of damaged on arrival.
To improve and monitor the overall quality of your topics, intelligent triage makes
two types of proactive recommendations:

Create new topic: Intelligent triage identifies gaps in your topic
coverage and makes data-driven recommendations every week for new,
relevant topics that are tailored to your account’s ticket data. You can
review and accept topic recommendations to further fine tune your
setup.
When you accept a topic recommendation, it's immediately added to your
list of topics and starts detecting the topic of incoming customer
requests. Topics aren't intended to identify details of the ticket, such
as specific product or service names, branch locations, subscription
types, or similar details. Instead, see the entity classification feature
to identify business-critical information in your incoming requests
automatically.
If you want to create your own custom topics, see Personalizing intelligent triage by
creating custom topics.


Resolve topic conflict: Intelligent triage analyzes your account
whenever you create, modify, or deactivate a topic. If an overlapping or
duplicate topic is identified, a recommendation is made to resolve the
conflict.
A topic is considered to be overlapping when it contains
expressions that are similar to other topics. Recommendations for an
overlapping topic contain suggested content changes that can help
differentiate the topics during ticket classification.
An topic is considered a duplicate when it fully overlaps with
other topics, causing the system to treat them as identical. When you
have a recommendation to review a duplicate topic, you can resolve the
conflict by reviewing both topics and deactivating the unnecessary
duplicate. Removing duplicate topics helps prevent confusion during
ticket classification.
For some duplicate topics, you may want to consider creating an entity after
deactivating a topic. For example, say you have the following two topics
that are considered duplicates:

Missing deposit
Missing deposit in Acme Bank

In this case, you could deactivate the "Missing deposit in Acme Bank"
topic and then create an entity to extract the bank name from the
ticket.



You're always in control and must accept or decline a recommendation before any
action is taken. If you decline a recommendation and want to come back to it later,
you can filter your list of topic recommendations. See Filtering topic recommendations.


Monitoring topic quality at a glance

The Topic page in Admin Center displays three counters that give you an
at-a-glance view of your topic health:



Tickets automated with topics: The number of tickets that have been
automatically routed or actioned using topics. Click View automation
recommendations to explore workflow automation recommendations.

New topic suggestions: The number of new topics recommended based on
your account's ticket data. Click View all to review and accept or
decline suggestions. See Reviewing topic recommendations to
learn more.

Conflicts: The number of duplicate or overlapping topics detected in
your account. Click View all to review and resolve conflicts. See
Resolving topic conflicts to learn more.




Understanding a topic recommendation

You can always review more details about a recommendation to help you
decide if you want to accept or decline it. A topic recommendation includes the
following details:

Name, description, and category.
Coverage, which is the percentage of tickets the topic would
affect (new topic) or currently affects (topic conflict).
The number of days used to calculate the recommendation. For
example, seven days.
The date the recommendation was created.
For new topics, a list of five ticket examples that fit into this
topic recommendation.





Reviewing topic recommendations

As an alternative to manually creating custom topics, you can review and
accept personalized topic recommendations to automate and simplify topic
maintenance.
You can find topic recommendations on the Topic page in Admin Center every
week when relevant recommendations are available.
Note: Intelligent triage starts
making topic recommendations one week after it’s been activated in your
account.

To review new topic recommendations


In Admin Center, click
AI in the sidebar, then select Intelligent triage > Topic.
If you have new
recommendations, a banner displays above your topics list.

Click the Recommendations tab.
Click a recommended topic’s Name.
The topic recommendation appears in the right-hand
panel.

See Understanding a topic recommendation to learn more.

Review the topic and click one of the following:

Add
topic If you accept the recommendation, it’s added to
your list of topics and immediately starts detecting the topic in
incoming requests.



Decline If you decline the recommendation, a dialog window
opens asking for your feedback.

Select a reason
and enter any additional comments and click Submit
feedback.







Resolving topic conflicts

Intelligent triage identifies duplicate or overlapping topics in your account. To
help you fine-tune your topic coverage for your specific business needs, you can
review and resolve any detected topic conflicts.
To resolve topic conflicts

In Admin Center, click
AI in the sidebar, then select Intelligent triage > Topic.
Click the Recommendations tab.
Click the name of a recommendation to resolve a topic conflict.
The recommendation
opens on the right. You can view more information about why the
recommendation was made, including the names of potential topic duplicates
or topics with similar expressions.

Take one of the following actions:
If the recommendation is for resolving a duplicate topic, click
Review duplicates.
Review the duplicated topics.

Select a topic
to deactivate, then click Deactivate selected. Confirm you
want to deactivate the topic.



If the recommendation is for resolving an overlapping topic, click
Review changes.
Review the
suggested changes, then click Save changes to apply the
suggestion.







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