Intelligent triageuses artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically analyze new support tickets by classifying customer intent, sentiment, and language, and enriches tickets with actionable details, such as product names.

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Summary: ◀▼

Automatically detect customer intent, sentiment, and language in support tickets using AI-powered classifications. Use these insights to prioritize, route, and manage tickets based on customer emotions, language, and issue type. Configure detection settings for various channels and update classifications dynamically. Enhance workflows by creating custom intents, entities, and views, improving ticket handling and customer satisfaction through targeted automation and analytics.

Intelligent triage uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically analyze new support tickets by classifying customer intent, sentiment, and language, and enriches tickets with actionable details, such as product names.

You can use this information to identify and display helpful context about your incoming tickets. Additionally, you can improve your workflows by incorporating AI classifications to more precisely deflect, route, and prioritize tickets.

This article describes how admins configure intelligent triage intent, sentiment, and language detection settings. To configure entity detection, see Detecting unique information in tickets with entities.

This article contains the following topics:

  • Understanding intelligent triage
  • Configuring intent settings for intelligent triage
  • Configuring sentiment settings for intelligent triage
  • Configuring language detection settings for intelligent triage
  • Next steps

Related articles:

  • Configuring intelligent triage for the agent experience

Understanding intelligent triage

The Zendesk machine learning model automatically provides classifications about your tickets when intelligent triage is turned on. These classifications are added as new custom fields to your tickets, which signal what a ticket is about, the language used, and the end user's emotional tone. Additionally, related tags are generated to simplify the creation of automated workflows, views, and reporting, helping agents and admins efficiently handle and prioritize support requests.

Intelligent triage classifications are supported for tickets that are started with a public comment by either an agent or end user.

Understanding intelligent triage fields

When you turn on intelligent triage, the system adds new custom fields to your tickets that are populated with prebuilt classifications by the Zendesk machine learning model:

  • Intent: Signals what the ticket is about. The classification is made based on the ticket's subject and the text of the first public comment. If configured to do so, the intent is updated every time the end user replies.

    You can see the possible intent values in the Intents page. If you want to update intent values in the Intent custom field, you can do so by editing an intent's name. Intent values can't be edited from your ticket field settings. See Editing and managing intents.

    The Zendesk Intent Model includes intents for all of the supported industries. Your account has access to relevant intents and use cases based on your ticket conversation data.

  • Language: Signals which language the ticket is written in. To see the possible values, open the Language page in Admin Center. For the Language field, intelligent triage can detect approximately 150 different languages.
  • Sentiment: Signals how positive or negative the customer feels about their request. Possible values are Very Positive, Positive, Neutral, Negative, and Very Negative. The classification is made based on the text of the first message in the ticket. If configured to do so, the sentiment is updated every time the end user replies.

    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.

In addition, each of these fields has an associated confidence field to indicate how likely the classification is accurate. These fields are populated by the Zendesk 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.

Understanding intelligent triage tags

When the Intent, Sentiment, and Language fields are populated, tags are also automatically added to the ticket to help you build views, 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

When creating business rules, you can use the field value or the tag, depending on which is easier. For example, when creating a trigger with multiple intents, it’s easier to use tags because you can add them faster than adding separate conditions for multiple field values.

Configuring intent settings for intelligent triage

Intents signal what each ticket is about. You can configure intent settings in Admin Center.

By default, intent detection is turned on. To turn off intent detection, see Turning off intent detection.

To configure intent settings

  1. In Admin Center, click AI in the sidebar, then select Intelligent triage > Intent.
  2. Click Manage Settings.
  3. To update a ticket's intent based on the latest end user message in a conversation, click the checkbox under Dynamic detection.

    Dynamic detection applies to only new tickets created after you turn this setting on.

  4. Under Channels, configure the channels you want to detect intent:
    • For Email and async channels, click the drop-down, then select or deselect the channels.

      The Web form, Email, and Web service (API) channels are selected by default. If you create tickets via channel integrations, select Social messaging.

      The Closed tickets channel is for follow-up tickets. See Follow-up ticket considerations.

    • For Messaging channels, click the drop-down, then select or deselect the channels.

      The Web Widget, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger channels are selected by default.

      Selecting any one of the Web Widget, iOS SDK, Android SDK, or Native Messaging channels automatically selects all four channels together.

    • Select the Voice checkbox to detect intent on post-call transcripts.

      Call transcription must be turned on and transcripts must be shown on tickets for intent to be detected on the voice channel.

  5. To exclude tickets created by agents from intent detection, click the checkbox under Exclusion conditions.

  6. Click Save.

Configuring sentiment settings for intelligent triage

Sentiments signal how the user feels about their request. You can configure sentiment settings in Admin Center.

By default, sentiment detection is turned on. To turn off sentiment detection, see Turning off sentiment prediction.

To configure sentiment settings

  1. In Admin Center, click AI in the sidebar, then select Intelligent triage > Sentiment.
  2. Click Manage Settings.
  3. Select the checkbox under Dynamic detection to update a ticket's sentiment based on the latest end user message in a conversation.

    Dynamic detection applies to only new tickets created after you turn this setting on.

  4. Under Channels, configure the channels you want to classify sentiment:
    • For Email and async channels, click the drop-down, then select or deselect the channels.

      The Web form, Email, and Web service (API) channels are selected by default. If you create tickets via channel integrations, select Social messaging.

      The Closed tickets channel is for follow-up tickets. See Follow-up ticket considerations.

    • For Messaging channels, click the drop-down, then select or deselect the channels.

      The Web Widget, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger channels are selected by default.

      Selecting any one of the Web Widget, iOS SDK, Android SDK, or Native Messaging channels automatically selects all four channels together.

    • Select the Voice checkbox to detect intent on post-call transcripts.

      Call transcription must be turned on and transcripts must be shown on tickets for sentiment to be detected on the voice channel.

  5. To exclude tickets created by agents from sentiment classification, click the checkbox under Exclusion conditions.

  6. Click Save.

Configuring language detection settings for intelligent triage

Language signals what language the ticket is written in. You can configure language detection settings in Admin Center.

By default, language detection is turned on. To turn off language detection, see Turning off language detection.

To configure intelligent triage language settings

  1. In Admin Center, click AI in the sidebar, then select Intelligent triage > Language.
  2. Click Manage Settings.
  3. Under Channels, configure the channels you want to detect language:
    • For Email and async channels, click the drop-down, then select or deselect the channels.

      The Web form, Email, and Web service (API) channels are selected by default. If you create tickets via channel integrations, select Social messaging.

      The Closed tickets channel is for follow-up tickets. See Follow-up ticket considerations.

    • For Messaging channels, click the drop-down, then select or deselect the channels.

      The Web Widget, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger channels are selected by default.

      Selecting any one of the Web Widget, iOS SDK, Android SDK, or Native Messaging channels automatically selects all four channels together.

    • Select the Voice checkbox to detect intent on post-call transcripts.

      Call transcription must be turned on and transcripts must be shown on tickets for language to be detected on the voice channel.

  4. To exclude tickets created by agents from language detection, select the checkbox under Exclusion conditions.

  5. Click Save.

Next steps

After you've configured intent, sentiment, and language detection features, it's recommended that you finish setting up intelligent triage by:
  • Creating entities to detect unique information in tickets.
  • Creating custom intents to personalize intelligent triage for your specific business needs.
  • Configuring how intelligent triage predictions are shown to agents to increase their productivity.
When you're done setting up intelligent triage, you can take these actions to maximize its impact on your support workflows by:
  • Creating views for your automatically triaged tickets: Surface tickets based on AI classifications, such as intent and sentiment, so that your teams can quickly focus on high-priority or specialized issues. This streamlines ticket management and boosts response times
  • Choosing a routing method for automatically triaged tickets: Automatically assign tickets to the right agents or teams using intelligent triage data. For example, route urgent or negative sentiment tickets to priority support, or direct product-specific issues to specialized experts. This can ensure faster and more accurate resolutions.
  • Leverage prebuilt analytics dashboards to analyze intelligent triage performance: Gain actionable insights on how AI-powered classifications are enhancing ticket handling. Monitor trends in customer sentiment, popular intents, and language distribution to continuously optimize your workflows and improve customer satisfaction.
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