Personalizing intelligent triage by creating custom intents

Verified AI summary ◀▼
Create custom intents to tailor intelligent triage to your business needs. By defining specific intents, categories, and subcategories, you enhance ticket classification accuracy and organization. Custom intents are unique to your account and help predict ticket topics without identifying specific details. Admins can easily create and manage these intents to improve customer support operations.


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

Related articles:

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



About custom intents

An intent is a prediction of what the ticket is about. When you activate intelligent
triage, your account includes a prebuilt list of intents 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 tag the ticket with an intent of
damaged on arrival.
To improve your intent coverage and increase the accuracy of your intent detections,
you can create custom intents that are specific to your business needs. Any custom
intents you create are specific to your Zendesk account and aren’t available to
other Zendesk accounts. See Examples of custom intents in the
section below for examples of well-defined, custom intents.
As you create custom intents, you can create custom categories and subcategories to
group them in. Custom intent categorization helps you organize your intent
structure.
To further fine tune your setup, you can also review and accept intent
recommendations made by intelligent triage. See Reviewing intent recommendations.
When you create a custom intent, it's immediately added to your list of intents and
starts detecting the intent of incoming customer requests. Intents 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 detection feature to identify business-critical
information in your incoming requests automatically.
Note that AI agents can't leverage the detection of
custom intents.



Creating a custom intent

Admins can create custom intents in Admin Center. A custom intent should explain the
main reason the end user is reaching out and cover a single reason.
You can also create custom intent categories and subcategories when you create an
intent.
To create a custom intent, you must have intents turned on.
Before creating a custom intent, 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.
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.


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.





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