Personalizing intelligent triage by creating custom topics

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 each account's ticket data.


What's my plan?







Add-on

Copilot







Summary: ◀▼
Custom topics let you tailor intelligent triage to your business by classifying tickets with clearer, more specific topic, category, and subcategory labels. You can fill gaps in default topics, keep your topic library organized, and improve ticket routing and reporting by using concise names, clear descriptions, and non-overlapping topics.





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 each account's ticket data.
To give you greater flexibility over your available topics, you can create custom topics
that address issues specific to your business needs. You can also add new categories and
subcategories as you create custom topics so that you can keep your topics
organized.
This article contains the following topics:

About custom topics
Creating a custom topic
Examples of custom topics

Related articles:

Automatically classifying tickets with
intelligent triage
Accessing and viewing intelligent triage
topics



About custom topics

A topic is an AI-powered classification of what a ticket is about. While intelligent
triage includes prebuilt topics for your industry, you can create custom topics to
fill any gaps in the predefined list. Your custom topics are unique to your account
and begin detecting incoming requests immediately upon activation.
To further fine tune your topics, you can also review and accept topic recommendations
made by intelligent triage.
Topics 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 topics

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

Topic guidelines











Guideline
Description




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



Optimize for operational clarity
Topics 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 topics to
match those processes.


Remove ambiguity
Topic 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 topic includes and its primary purpose.
Keep both the name and description closely
aligned and focused on defining the topic, rather
than listing exclusions or unrelated
scenarios.



Avoid redundancy

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








Topic best practices



Use the default topics provided. Modify these topics 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 a topic, make sure the same user request is
represented.

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

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







Creating a custom topic

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


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


Note: Custom topics 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 topic 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. Topics are organized hierarchically in three
levels: category, subcategory, and topic. The category is the broad
reason for an incoming request, the subcategory provides a more detailed
breakdown of the reason, and the topic 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 topic. The new topic is added to the Topic
list tab and is labeled Custom.






Examples of custom topics

Below are some examples of well-defined custom topics:
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 topics",
"description": "You can create and organize custom topics for intelligent triage, then define names, descriptions, categories, and subcategories to classify incoming tickets by request type.",
"articleSection": "Using Intelligent triage ticket predictions",
"datePublished": "2025-01-15T17:46:10+00:00",
"dateModified": "2026-07-01T15:23:19.842335+00:00",
"inLanguage": "en",
"mainEntityOfPage": {
"@type": "WebPage",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/8718789695002"