Automatically detecting customer intent, language, and sentiment

Attention: You must have the Advanced AI add-on to use the features described in this article.

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.

When intelligent triage is enabled, Intelligence in the context panel is automatically available for users in the Agent Workspace. This panel shows users the ticket's predicted intent, language, and sentiment, along with suggested macros.

This article contains the following topics:

• Requirements for using intelligent triage
• Understanding intelligent triage
• Turning on and configuring intelligent triage

Related articles:

• About intelligent triage and Intelligence in the context panel
• Viewing and managing intelligent triage predictions

Requirements for using intelligent triage

Intelligent triage is available for organizations who meet the following requirements:

Requirement type	Requirement criteria
Plan	Suite Professional and above (Legacy plans not eligible) Support Professional and above (Legacy plans not eligible)
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.	Retail and e-commerce business-to-consumer (B2C). Does not include manufacturers, wholesale, business-to-business (B2B), or customer-to-customer (C2C). Software platforms or applications. B2C only. Does not include companies that commercialize gadgets or hardware components. Financial services. Traditional and online banking only. B2C only. Insurance: Includes auto, health, home, and pet insurance. Employee experience: Includes IT and HR departments only.
Ticket volume This requirement applies only to intent predictions.	More than 1,500 tickets in the supported languages in the last 6 months
Ticket language distribution	At least 90% of tickets in the following languages: English, French, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Dutch, Korean, Turkish, Chinese, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Polish, Arabic, Romanian, Czech
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

Tip: When creating triggers, automations, or reports, you can use the field value or the tag, depending on which one makes your build 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.

To learn how to create a report showing the results of intelligent triage, see Explore recipe: Intelligent triage predictions and confidence.

Tip: You can also use the Tickets API to return the intent, language, and sentiment as custom field values.

Understanding intent, language, and sentiment values

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:

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish Japanese	Russian Dutch Korean Turkish Chinese (Simplified) Swedish	Norwegian Danish Polish Arabic Romanian Czech

For the Language field, intelligent triage can detect approximately 150 different languages.

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

Administrators can turn on intelligent triage in Admin Center.

Intelligent triage adds predictions to tickets that were created only after it was turned on. Tickets that were created before intelligent triage was turned on show Not available for the prediction value.

To turn on and configure intelligent triage

1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Intelligent triage.
2. Select Turn on 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?

   

3. To further configure or turn off the individual prediction types, click Settings for the prediction type (intent, language, or sentiment) you want to modify.
4. 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 enabled by default. You can also enable the Text, Web Widget, Mobile SDK, and Mobile channels.
     Note: While we generally don’t recommend enabling additional channels, you might consider enabling them if you have a lot of 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 enabled by default. You can also enable the Android SDK, Google RCS, Instagram DM, iOS SDK, LINE, Slack, Telegram, Twilio SMS, X Corp DM, Viber, and WeChat channels.
   • Exclusion conditions: To exclude tickets created by agents from being enriched with the prediction type, select the Ignore agent-initiated tickets checkbox.

     

5. Click Save.

Note: If you use any third-party tools to make automated updates to your tickets, make sure those tools are configured to use the safe_update property so that intelligent triage ticket fields aren’t inadvertently overwritten. See Protecting against ticket update collisions.