Intelligent triage uses artificial intelligence (AI) to enrich your Support and messaging tickets with actionable information without the help of agents or admins. Specifically, intelligent triage predicts the intent, language, and customer sentiment for new tickets. You can then use this information to automate workflows with triggers and automations, set up views for teams, create Explore reports, and more.
This article contains the following topics:
- Requirements for using intelligent triage
- Understanding intelligent triage
- Turning on and configuring intelligent triage
Related articles:
Requirements for using intelligent triage
Intelligent triage is available for organizations who meet the following requirements:
Requirement type | Requirement criteria |
---|---|
Plan |
|
Industry This requirement applies only to intent predictions. You may still use intelligent triage for language and sentiment predictions without being in one of the listed industries. |
|
Ticket volume This requirement applies only to intent predictions. |
More than 1,000 tickets created by end users in the supported languages in the last 6 months |
Ticket language distribution | At least 90% of tickets in a supported language |
Right model fit This requirement applies only to intent predictions. |
To determine how well the current machine learning model applies to an account, we perform a quality check in a sample of tickets from the past 6 months. During the quality check, intelligent triage must label at least 30% of tickets with high confidence and at least 60% with medium confidence. |
Limited availability participants
Zendesk previously offered intelligent triage as part of a limited availability offering. To have been part of the limited availability offering, you had to have:
- Met the requirements listed above
- Activated intelligent triage before Dec 12, 2022
Customers who took advantage of the limited availability offering retain free access to the intelligent triage functionality released before December 12, 2022 without needing to purchase a paid plan add-on. Additional functionality won't be included in the free limited availability offering.
Understanding intelligent triage
When you enable intelligent triage, the system adds new fields to your tickets:
- Intent: A prediction of what the ticket is about. To see the possible values, open the Taxonomy tab of the Intent settings page to see the AI Intents list under the Taxonomy values heading.
- Intent confidence: How likely it is that the intent prediction is correct. Possible values are High, Medium, and Low.
- Language: A prediction of what language the ticket is written in. To see the possible values, open the Taxonomy tab of the settings page.
- Language confidence: How likely it is that the language prediction is correct. Possible values are High, Medium, and Low.
- Sentiment: A prediction of how the customer feels about their request. Possible values are Very Positive, Positive, Neutral, Negative, and Very Negative.
- Sentiment confidence: How likely it is that the sentiment prediction is correct. Possible values are High, Medium, and Low.
These fields are populated via ticket updates by Zendesk’s machine learning model based on the content of the first message of a ticket when it’s submitted. Agents can update the field values if necessary.
When the fields are populated, tags are also automatically added to the ticket to help you build triggers, automations, and reporting. These tags reflect the values in the Intent, Language, and Sentiment fields, and are structured as follows:
- intent__value of Intent field
- language__value of Language field
- sentiment__value of Sentiment field
Understanding intent, language, and sentiment values
Intent
For the Intent field, intelligent triage is trained to identify intents specifically for certain industries. Additionally, intent and sentiment detection works only for the following languages:
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The Zendesk Intent Model includes intents for all of the supported industries. An account with this model has access to relevant intents and use cases based on their ticket conversation data. This model allows us to support accounts with multiple brands, mixed use cases, and industries that cross over between our currently supported industries.
Language
For the Language field, intelligent triage can detect approximately 150 different languages. See Zendesk language support by product.
Sentiment
The Sentiment field is a prediction of how positive or negative a customer feels about the request they’re submitting. The prediction is made based on the text of the first message in the ticket and is grouped into one of the following categories:
- Very positive: The message likely contains strong positive words (like “brilliant” or “perfect”), positive words modified by intensity adverbs, or multiple positive sentences.
- Positive: The message likely contains phrases expressing gratitude, or one to two positive sentences.
- Neutral: The message likely contains factual statements without additional negative quantifiers (like “any” or “always”), or a mix of positive and negative statements.
- Negative: The message likely contains phrases expressing frustration, complaints containing negative words, or repetition of the same dissatisfaction.
- Very negative: The message likely contains strong negative words, capitalized text, multiple exclamation marks, or multiple negative phrases.
Intelligent triage is specifically calibrated for customer service. This means that a ticket isn’t assigned a negative sentiment just because a customer has an issue with their order, can’t find the information they need, or some other similar “negative” situation. Instead, the model is tuned to analyze sentiment with the assumption that the customer is contacting customer service because they have an issue that needs to be addressed.
Turning on and configuring intelligent triage
Admins can turn on intelligent triage in Admin Center. By default, this feature is turned on.
Intelligent triage adds predictions to tickets that were created only after it was turned on. For other reasons you might not see predictions on tickets, see Why didn't intelligent triage add predictions to a ticket?
To turn on and configure intelligent triage
-
In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Intelligent triage.
You're taken to the following screen, where the status of the Intent, Language, and Sentiment prediction types is initially listed as Pending. After a moment, the status changes to Active, letting you know that intelligent triage is ready. If the Intent status shows Unavailable, see Why is the intent unavailable?
- To configure or turn off the individual prediction types, hover your mouse over the prediction type (intent, language, or sentiment) you want to modify and select Settings from the options menu.
- On the prediction type's settings page, choose from the following
options:
- Turn on <prediction type> triage: Clear the checkbox if you don't want the system to automatically enrich tickets with that prediction type.
-
Email channels: The Web form, Email, and
Web service (API) channels are turned on by default.
You can also turn on the Text, Web Widget,
Mobile SDK, Mobile, Facebook Post, X
Corp, and Social Messaging channels. (If you
create tickets via channel integrations,
select Social Messaging.)Note: While we generally don’t recommend turning on additional channels, you might consider enabling them if you have high ticket volume on those channels. Channels with more conversational messages, system notifications, or spam will have lower-confidence predictions.
-
Messaging channels: The Web Widget,
WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger channels are
turned on by default. You can also turn on the Android
SDK, Google RCS, Instagram DM, iOS
SDK, LINE, Slack, Telegram,
Twilio SMS, X Corp DM, Viber,
WeChat, Apple Business Chat, Google
Business Messages, KakaoTalk, MessageBird
SMS, Native Messaging, and Sunshine
Conversations API channels.Note: Turning on any one of the Web Widget, iOS SDK, Android SDK, or Native Messaging channels automatically turns on all four channels together.
-
Exclusion conditions: To exclude tickets created by
agents from being enriched with the prediction type, select the
Ignore agent-initiated tickets checkbox.Note: When this checkbox is selected, suspended tickets that are recovered are not enriched with intelligent triage predictions.
- Click Save.
safe_update
property so that intelligent
triage ticket fields aren’t inadvertently overwritten. See Protecting against ticket update
collisions.
20 comments
Sos Abazyan
Hi! Will it be possible to change the intent values to our own labels/categories in the future?
3
David Falé
Hi Sos Abazyan!
Yes, you can change the intent field values but be careful not to subvert the meaning of the intent. Please note that the underlying intent tag will always remain with its original name.
At the moment we also do not allow you to create new intents, but this is something we are planning to support in the future.
0
CJ Johnson
Can you clarify what is different about detecting the language in this feature, vs people not using this? How is this different from the email-based language detection that Zendesk uses for all accounts currently?
9
Ian Marston
Hi David Falé
Thanks for the info (provided to another person) re. changing the intent values
We use CX engage for phone calls which auto generates a ticket!
Its obvious the AI cannot properly handle the intent as the ticket subject and first element is pre-populated.
Unfortunately the AI keeps defining the intent as "Request phone call with agent"
I tried amending the field value "Misc::Contact::Request phone call with agent" to "Misc::Contact::Phone log"
However, keep getting "This item is required by an installed app on your account, so it cannot be modified."
Any suggestions please?
Also, despite selecting all the available channels, it doesnt work on chat
2
Erin O'Callaghan
Hi Thomas, I've updated the article to say "Suite Professional and above" to align with the header.
0
Susana
Hello,
Currently the Intent field is not user friendly, there are too many options to choose from and not the possibility to easily search within the available ones. Perhaps a "start typing" feature could be added where the Intent field would show the matching options. Example: If I type "Missing", the field would show me all available options that include the word "Missing". This would make our job much easier in case we need to change the AI pre selected Intent.
Thanks!
4
Allen Lai | Head of CX at Otter.ai
It's a great start, but it needs a lot of improvements.
3
Tony
I'm not too sure about merging multiple intents together. But in the meantime, thank you very much for your feedback. Your feedback helps us grow – so we appreciate taking some time for sharing it with us.
Best,
0
Allen Lai | Head of CX at Otter.ai
Thanks, Tony! The use of merging intents is helpful because several intents are very similar. Creating various triggers, automation, views, etc., to include every variation of the same intent is not efficient or effective, so being able to merge them would be helpful.
2
Håvard Skare
Hi.
The intelligence function is still unavailable, even though it is enabled in the settings. Any thoughts on why? (Language: norwegian)
0
Cheeny Aban
If all the requirements to use intelligence are met and it is still not working on your tickets, I would suggest that you initiate a conversation with us so one of our Engineers will be able to take a closer look into your account.
1
Jake Bantz
Håvard Skare,
This article is super helpful in tracking down why a ticket was not enriched by intelligent triage: Why didn’t intelligent triage add predictions to a ticket?
Can you please see if that helps to explain the behavior you're seeing? If you don't find your answer there, please feel free to reach out to our Support Engineers as Cheeny mentioned above, and they can help you out.
1
BAKO
Hello;
A large portion of our users are starting their conversation with the bot by requesting a transfer to an agent. So their first message is usually "Live support" or "Talk to human"
This is fine for us, but the Intent for these tickets is settled on "Transfer to agent" and doesn't change.
We know agents can change the intent, however, If the zendesk would let me check the intent form a custom ticket field for example, I can prompt users to ask their issue with a "Ask fo detail" step in the bot and then form the intent over that.
This would allow me to automatically categorize every ticket.
Currently, we can delete an intent using triggers btw. We just need a reverse version of that so the ticket can re-evaluated when it has some context.
0
Paul Tarling
Hi there,
When are you intending to release Intents for different industries? I work in Mobile/Telecoms and purchased the Advanced AI add-on late last year. It's very disappointing that we can't use the majority of the AI features being added at the moment, it seems like Zendesk's focus has drifted on to expanding the use of Intent's in to other features, rather than worrying about releasing the verticals that paying customers need in order to make use of some of these features. I see that Custom Intents has now been released, but I'm not sure if I can use that to build out all of the intents that are needed for my industry?
Paul.
0
Shawna James
0
Pavel Gärtner
Hello, i have created the trigger with Notify by Autoreply with articles. You can see bellow. Emails are sending, but articles are not attached. I find out, that there can be problem with Intelligent triage. I would like to check settings or activate it but i dont have this item in settings (under admin account) as you can see also bellow. We have "Professional Tier! Could you give me advice what to do?
Thank you very much Pavel
0
Zach Gilbert
I'm not seeing it, but maybe missing something. Is there a way to set the users profile language based on the intelligent triage language prediction being high? I tried to make a trigger, but could not see a way to set the action to the user profile. I want to use this in connection with dynamic content.
0
Athar Hussain
Is there any roadmap to expand into B2B businesses? Or at least allow further customization so that intelligent triage can be utelized in B2B markets?
0
Wouter Mestdagh
How can we enable our agents to manually change the detected sentiment of a ticket (similar to which is already possible for the intent)?
0
Thomas Verschoren
Wouter Mestdagh add the sentiment field as a ticket field. Agents can change it that way.
0