Personalizing intelligent triage by creating custom intents


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


What's my plan?







Add-on

Copilot







Summary: ◀▼
You can create custom intents to tailor AI ticket classification to your specific business needs, filling gaps left by prebuilt intents. Custom intents help organize requests by category and subcategory, improving workflow clarity and accuracy. Follow guidelines to ensure each intent represents a single use case, avoids redundancy, and uses clear naming. Review recommendations to manage conflicts and optimize intent performance.




Intelligent triage leverages AI to automatically classify
incoming tickets by intent, language and sentiment. The Zendesk Intent Model includes
pre-trained intents across several industries, providing relevant intents and use cases
tailored to each account's ticket data.
To give you greater flexibility over your available intents, you can create custom
intents that address issues specific to your business needs. You can also add new
categories and subcategories as you create custom intents so that you can keep your
intents organized.
This article contains the following topics:

About custom intents
Creating a custom intent
Examples of custom intents

Related articles:

Automatically detecting customer intent,
language, and sentiment
Accessing and viewing intelligent triage
intents



About custom intents

An intent is an AI-powered classification of what a ticket is about. While
intelligent triage includes prebuilt intents for your industry, you can create
custom intents to fill any gaps in the predefined list. Your custom intents are
unique to your account and begin detecting incoming requests immediately upon
activation.
To further fine tune your intents, you can also review and accept intent recommendations
made by intelligent triage.
Intents are designed to identify the core reason for a request rather than specific
details such as product names or locations. Instead, see the entity detection feature to identify business-critical
information in your incoming requests automatically.


Guidelines and best practices for creating intents

To maintain a high-quality intent library, follow these guidelines and best
practices when creating or editing custom intents:

Intent guidelines











Guideline
Description




Represent a single use case
Each intent should be defined for only one use case.
Avoid combining multiple scenarios into one intent. This
ensures that the intent is meaningful and actionable
within your workflows. See Examples
of custom intents.



Optimize for operational clarity
Intents should help you identify the types of
requests you’re receiving, and help you develop
efficient workflows. If different processes are required
to resolve similar requests, create separate intents to
match those processes.


Remove ambiguity
Intent names and descriptions should be clear and
unambiguous. Choose precise words and phrases that avoid
multiple interpretations.


Ensure consistency
Provide a concise, unambiguous name that reflects the
core of the issue or request. The description should
directly expand on the name, offering clear context
about what the intent includes and its primary purpose.
Keep both the name and description closely
aligned and focused on defining the intent, rather
than listing exclusions or unrelated
scenarios.



Avoid redundancy

Check whether a
similar intent already exists. Similar or
overlapping intents can lead to low-confidence or
wrong intent detection. Additionally, creating a
high number of custom intents can lead to
performance
issues.








Intent best practices



Use the default intents provided. Modify these intents by
editing their names or
descriptions so that they're more consistent with your
business. Especially, refer to terminology used by your end users.
When editing an intent, make sure the same user request is
represented.

Create custom intents when the user request you want to detect
isn't represented in the list of intents available in your account.

Deactivate intents that aren't
useful, that don't fit your business, or are redundant.
Use the recommendations tab to review new intent suggestions,
and to understand if you have conflicts (overlap or duplicate) between
intents. Keep in mind that every time you make a change to an intent,
it's reassessed for conflicts.







Creating a custom intent

To create a custom intent, you must have intents turned on.
Review the guidelines and best
practices before creating a custom intent.
To create a custom intent


In Admin Center, click
AI in the sidebar, then select Intelligent triage > Intent.
Click Create intent.
The Create custom intent page opens.
Enter a Name. Use a short, descriptive name for the intent. The
intent name is visible to agents, so make sure it’s clear and concise so
they can quickly understand it.


Note: Custom intents don't support special characters such as
dashes, underscores, colons, and so on.

Enter a Description. This is the explanation of what the ticket is
about. Clearly define what the intent should include and exclude. Write
the description as if you’re explaining an issue to an agent on their
first day. Consider including examples and common words that users might
use.

Select a Category. Intents are organized hierarchically in three
levels: category, subcategory, and intent. The category is the broad
reason for an incoming request, the subcategory provides a more detailed
breakdown of the reason, and the intent is a single, very specific
reason.
Alternatively, you can create a custom category:
Select+ Add category and subcategory from the menu.

Enter a Category name and subcategory name.

Click Add.


Click Create custom intent. The new intent is added to the Intent
list tab and is labeled Custom.






Examples of custom intents

Below are some examples of well-defined custom intents:
Product not working as expected



Name: Product not working as expected

Category: Order

Sub-category: Product issue

Description: The requester wants to report a product that is not
functioning correctly, has developed a fault, or is not meeting quality
expectations.

Cancel direct debit


Name: Cancel direct debit

Category: Billing

Sub-category: Change payment method

Description: The customer wants to stop or cancel an existing direct
debit or automatic payment arrangement. They may cite reasons such as financial
constraints, changes in circumstances, or dissatisfaction with the service.


Change booking arrival location


Name: Change booking arrival location

Category: Travel

Sub-category: Booking update

Description: The end user wants to modify the arrival location of their
booking. This could include changing flight destinations, correcting errors in
the booked location, or updating hotel addresses.



{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "TechArticle",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/8718789695002",
"url": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/8718789695002",
"headline": "Personalizing intelligent triage by creating custom intents",
"description": "You can create and customize AI-powered intents to classify incoming tickets by specific business needs, improving the organization and accuracy of ticket triage workflows.",
"articleSection": "Using Intelligent triage ticket predictions",
"datePublished": "2025-01-15T17:46:10+00:00",
"dateModified": "2026-04-10T22:07:06.370008+00:00",
"inLanguage": "en-US",
"mainEntityOfPage": {
"@type": "WebPage",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/8718789695002"
},
"author": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Zendesk",
"@id": "https://www.zendesk.com"
},
"publisher": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Zendesk",
"@id": "https://www.zendesk.com"
},
"isPartOf": {
"@type": "WebSite",
"name": "Zendesk Help",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/"
},
"about": {
"@type": "SoftwareApplication",
"name": "Zendesk",
"@id": "https://www.zendesk.com",
"softwareAddOn": {
"@type": "SoftwareApplication",
"name": "Copilot",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/4405303717658"
}
}
}
//
const ai_summary_style = document.createElement('style');
ai_summary_style.innerHTML = `#styled-article-body{padding:0 0 0}#article-body #docs-ai-summary{background-color:#f3f3f3;border:1px solid #d3d3d3;padding:10px 10px 6px;margin-bottom:16px}#article-body #docs-ai-summary #docs-ai-summary-toggle{font-size:.9em;font-weight:700;margin-bottom:4px;cursor:pointer;display:flex;justify-content:space-between;align-items:center}#article-body #docs-ai-summary #docs-ai-summary-toggle #up-triangle{margin-left:auto;padding-right:10px;display:none}#article-body #docs-ai-summary #docs-ai-summary-toggle #down-triangle{margin-left:auto;padding-right:10px}#article-body #docs-ai-summary #docs-ai-summary-content{font-size:.9em;padding-left:25px;padding-right:25px;margin-bottom:12px}`;
document.head.appendChild(ai_summary_style);

const toggleAISummary = () => {
const summary = document.getElementById("docs-ai-summary-content");
const upTriangle = document.getElementById("up-triangle");
const downTriangle = document.getElementById("down-triangle");
if (summary.style.display === "none") {
summary.style.display = "block";
upTriangle.style.display = "none";
downTriangle.style.display = "inline";
} else {
summary.style.display = "none";
upTriangle.style.display = "inline";
downTriangle.style.display = "none";
}
};

document.getElementById("docs-ai-summary-toggle").addEventListener("click", toggleAISummary);
//

