Intelligent triageuses AI to automatically classify new customer support tickets by topic, sentiment, and language, and enriches tickets with entities, such as product names. You can use these classifications to route tickets to the right groups automatically, create views to group similar types of requests, and report on trends in the types of tickets your customers are submitting.

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Intelligent triage uses AI to automatically classify new customer support tickets by topic, sentiment, and language, and enriches tickets with entities, such as product names. You can use these classifications to route tickets to the right groups automatically, create views to group similar types of requests, and report on trends in the types of tickets your customers are submitting.

Because intelligent triage can affect different areas of your ticket workflows, you might not know exactly where to start at first. This article discusses some best practices for gathering, analyzing, and acting on intelligent triage information.

For more information about intelligent triage, see Intelligent triage resources.

This article contains the following topics:

  • Gathering intelligent triage data
  • Analyzing and fine-tuning the results

Related articles:

  • Using intelligent triage to identify and act on ticket escalations
Note: When creating reports in Explore, intelligent triage values are available only in English. However, intelligent triage is capable of classifying content in the languages listed here.

Gathering intelligent triage data

Intelligent triage can have a powerful effect on your agents' workflows, saving them anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds per ticket by automatically identifying and routing a ticket based on its topic, language, or sentiment.

However, before you make any changes to your triage or routing workflows, it's helpful to understand exactly how intelligent triage classifies the tickets in your account. Getting to know the specific topic values and trends in your account will help you decide which workflow changes will best improve the agent and customer experience.

In general, it's recommended to start with these four steps:

  1. Understand how intelligent triage works from ticket submission to resolution. You should also understand how the system classifies topic, language, and sentiment values on tickets.
  2. Configure intelligent triage to start allowing tickets in your account to be classified with a topic, language, sentiment, or all three.
  3. Use the prebuilt intelligent triage dashboard or build custom reports to analyze intelligent triage classifications and see trends in your tickets. As you get started, consider building separate reports for topic, language, and sentiment to allow you to focus on one classification type at a time.
  4. Wait for approximately two weeks to allow for a sufficient sample size of tickets to be classified by intelligent triage.

Analyzing and fine-tuning the results

After a couple of weeks, intelligent triage should have classified enough tickets for you to be able to decide which actions to take. The following sections present some additional points to consider as you perform this analysis.

Identify trends in the classified topics, languages, and sentiments

First, take a look at the reports you built above and review the High and Medium confidence tickets. Look for trends, and decide whether you want to take action to improve them.

Trend Actions to consider
What are the most prevalent topics and languages?
  • Make sure your agents are trained to handle the most common types of requests.
  • Create knowledge base articles and other self-serve resources to deal with simple requests (like password resets), and automate responses to these types of tickets using macros.
  • Make sure you have agents who speak the same languages as your customers.
Are there any topics that would make sense for you to group together?
  • Create views that group similar topics together, and route them to the agents who are best suited to deal with them.
Are the classified topics and languages consistent with the initial message on each ticket?
  • If not, give feedback to Zendesk so the classification model can be improved.
  • You can also report on tickets where the topic was manually changed by an agent, signaling that the initial classification didn't hit the mark.
What trends are there in customer sentiment? Are negative-sentiment tickets especially prevalent for a specific product or category?

  • If you receive many negative-sentiment tickets, it might be worth giving agents additional training on diffusing tough situations.

  • If a specific product or category receives many negative-sentiment tickets, investigate whether there are improvements to the product that need to be made.

Decide which metrics you want to improve

Next, decide which metrics matter the most to your team. Do you want to raise CSAT ratings, meet SLAs more consistently, improve first response time, reduce group assignments, or something else?

Start by targeting one or two metrics, or perhaps a subset of topics, and consider how workflow changes can improve the overall experience. Target those areas first to get the maximum impact from intelligent triage.

Trend Action to consider
Low first reply times on urgent issues
  • Create a trigger that raises the priority for tickets with certain topics so that agents get to the ticket faster.
CSAT is low for tickets in a particular language
  • Route tickets of a particular language directly to the agents who are fluent in that language.
Tickets about a certain topic always require more information from an agent before they can be solved
  • Exclude these tickets from the normal “Ticket is created” trigger and instead create a trigger that sends the customer a message which prompts them to provide the needed information.
  • Consider updating your ticket forms to collect the required information as part of the original ticket.

Design, implement, and report in an iterative process

Regardless of the changes you decide to make, remember that this is an iterative process. You will identify trends, make changes accordingly, track the success of those changes, and repeat.

Here are some questions to consider as you design, implement, and report on your workflow changes:

  • What is the highest level of confidence needed for the workflow to be effective? For example, is it acceptable to send all tickets with a certain topic to a designated group and ask that they manually reroute if the topic was wrong, or should only tickets with a High confidence level be routed to that group?
  • Should the workflow apply a tag or update some other ticket attribute to allow for easier reporting in the future?

Establish two-way communication with your agents

Inform your agents of any changes you make so that they’re equipped to provide feedback on them, both good and bad.

For example, consider setting up a macro to tag tickets where the agent has feedback, and include an internal note where they can record their feedback about the workflow.

Ask your agents about particular pain points they have with tickets. If there is a particular group of topics where they see complications, brainstorm ways to adapt your workflows to improve the agent and customer experience.

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