Intelligent triage leverages AI to automatically classify incoming tickets by topic, language and sentiment. The Zendesk Topic Model includes pre-trained topics across several industries, providing relevant topics and use cases tailored to each account's ticket data.
To give you greater flexibility over your available topics, you can create custom topics that address issues specific to your business needs. You can also add new categories and subcategories as you create custom topics so that you can keep your topics organized.
This article contains the following topics:
Related articles:
About custom topics
A topic is an AI-powered classification of what a ticket is about. While intelligent triage includes prebuilt topics for your industry, you can create custom topics to fill any gaps in the predefined list. Your custom topics are unique to your account and begin detecting incoming requests immediately upon activation.
To further fine tune your topics, you can also review and accept topic recommendations made by intelligent triage.
Topics are designed to identify the core reason for a request rather than specific details such as product names or locations. Instead, see the entity detection feature to identify business-critical information in your incoming requests automatically.
Guidelines and best practices for creating topics
To maintain a high-quality topic library, follow these guidelines and best practices when creating or editing custom topics:
Topic guidelines
| Guideline | Description |
|---|---|
| Represent a single use case | Each topic should be defined for only one use case. Avoid combining multiple scenarios into one topic. This ensures that the topic is meaningful and actionable within your workflows. |
| Optimize for operational clarity | Topics should help you identify the types of requests you’re receiving, and help you develop efficient workflows. If different processes are required to resolve similar requests, create separate topics to match those processes. |
| Remove ambiguity | Topic names and descriptions should be clear and unambiguous. Choose precise words and phrases that avoid multiple interpretations. |
| Ensure consistency | Provide a concise, unambiguous name that reflects the
core of the issue or request. The description should
directly expand on the name, offering clear context
about what the topic includes and its primary purpose.
Keep both the name and description closely aligned and focused on defining the topic, rather than listing exclusions or unrelated scenarios. |
| Avoid redundancy |
Check whether a
similar topic already exists. Similar or overlapping topics can lead to low-confidence or wrong topic detection. Additionally, creating a high number of custom topics can lead to performance issues. |
Topic best practices
- Use the default topics provided. Modify these topics by editing their names or
descriptions so that they're more consistent with your
business.
Especially, refer to terminology used by your end users. When editing a topic, make sure the same user request is represented.
- Create custom topics when the user request you want to detect isn't represented in the list of topics available in your account.
- Deactivate topics that aren't useful, that don't fit your business, or are redundant.
- Use the recommendations tab to review new topic suggestions,
and to understand if you have conflicts (overlap or duplicate) between
topics.
Keep in mind that every time you make a change to a topic, it's reassessed for conflicts.
Creating a custom topic
To create a custom topic, you must have topics turned on.
Review the guidelines and best practices before creating a custom topic.
To create a custom topic
- In Admin Center, click
AI in the sidebar, then select Intelligent triage > Topic. - Click Create topic.
The Create custom topic page opens.
- Enter a Name.
Use a short, descriptive name for the topic. The topic name is visible to agents, so make sure it’s clear and concise so they can quickly understand it.
Note: Custom topics don't support special characters such as dashes, underscores, colons, and so on. - Enter a Description.
This is the explanation of what the ticket is about. Clearly define what the topic should include and exclude. Write the description as if you’re explaining an issue to an agent on their first day. Consider including examples and common words that users might use.
- Select a Category.
Topics are organized hierarchically in three levels: category, subcategory, and topic. The category is the broad reason for an incoming request, the subcategory provides a more detailed breakdown of the reason, and the topic is a single, very specific reason.
Alternatively, you can create a custom category:- Select+ Add category and subcategory from the menu.
- Enter a Category name and subcategory name.
- Click Add.
- Select+ Add category and subcategory from the menu.
- Click Create custom topic.
The new topic is added to the Topic list tab and is labeled Custom.
Examples of custom topics
Below are some examples of well-defined custom topics:
Product not working as expected
- Name: Product not working as expected
- Category: Order
- Sub-category: Product issue
- Description: The requester wants to report a product that is not functioning correctly, has developed a fault, or is not meeting quality expectations.
Cancel direct debit
- Name: Cancel direct debit
- Category: Billing
- Sub-category: Change payment method
- Description: The customer wants to stop or cancel an existing direct debit or automatic payment arrangement. They may cite reasons such as financial constraints, changes in circumstances, or dissatisfaction with the service.
Change booking arrival location
- Name: Change booking arrival location
- Category: Travel
- Sub-category: Booking update
- Description: The end user wants to modify the arrival location of their booking. This could include changing flight destinations, correcting errors in the booked location, or updating hotel addresses.