Intents are predetermined topics that represent customer questions and requests. They are drawn from a set of industry-specific topics developed by Zendesk using our own anonymized customer service data.
Intents can be assigned to answers to help you save time and increase bot accuracy. When you assign an intent to an answer, the bot knows to show this answer whenever it identifies the intent in a conversation with a customer.
You can also create answers based on intent suggestions on the Insights dashboard. See Resolve intents without answers.
This article includes the following sections:
Requirements for using intents
To use intents, your account must meet the following requirements:
Requirement type | Requirement criteria |
---|---|
Plan | All Suite and Support plans |
Industry |
|
Languages | Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese (simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese |
Adding suggested intents to answers
When creating an answer for a conversation bot, Zendesk will suggest intents that can help your bot accurately understand your customers’ needs. These suggested, or pre-trained, intents can be used in place of training phrases to help your conversation bot match and deliver the most relevant answer for a customer's question.
Each suggested intent can be associated with one answer. You can add up to three intents to each answer.
Using suggested intents in new answers
You can apply suggested intents to your answers during the creation process.
To create an answer using suggested intents
- In Admin Center, click Channels in the sidebar, then select Bots and automations > Bots.
- Under Conversation bot, click Manage bots.
- Click an existing bot to open its edit page or create a new bot.
- On the Answers tab of the bot’s edit page, click Create
answer.Note: If you choose one of the answer templates at this step, your answer will immediately open in bot builder. See Designing a conversation bot using answers.
- On the Create answer page, click Build your own answer, then click Next.
- Enter a name for your answer. The name should be a brief, clear description of the issue addressed by the answer.
- Click Next. Up to three pre-trained intents are displayed:
- Select one or more of the suggested intents.
If none of the suggested intents describe the customer problem, click Train the bot yourself to add training phrases.
If no intents are suggested, the training phrases entry UI opens automatically. The answer creation process continues as described in Creating an answer for a bot
- Click Next. The answer opens in the bot builder.
The intents selected in the previous step appear in the answer’s configuration panel on the right side of the bot builder.
- Add additional steps to the answer as needed. You need to add at least one step to the answer.
- Click Preview to see how the answer will appear to your end users, then click Done when you’re satisfied with the answer.
If you enter your own training phrases (as described in step 7) and suggested intents are available, they will appear in the configuration panel in bot builder as well.
Click Dismiss to remove the suggested intents. For information on replacing training phrases with these intents, see Adding suggested intents to an existing answer.Adding suggested intents to an existing answer
When you add suggested intents to an existing answer, the training phrases are hidden but not deleted. You can revert to using the training phrases at any time.
To add suggested intents to an existing answer
- In Admin Center, click Channels in the sidebar, then select Bots and automations > Bots.
- Under Conversation bot, click Manage bots.
- Click an existing bot to open its edit page.
- On the Answers tab of the bot’s edit page, click the answer you want to update.
- If intents are available for the answer, they’ll appear in the configuration panel. If no intents are suggested, try making the answer name more descriptive.
- Select the intents you want to add to the answer, then click Use selected intents.
- You can revert to the previous training phrases by clicking Train the bot yourself.