Personalizing intelligent triage by creating custom intents

Add-on

Copilot

Summary: ◀▼

You can create custom intents to tailor AI ticket classification to your specific business needs, filling gaps left by prebuilt intents. Custom intents help organize requests by category and subcategory, improving workflow clarity and accuracy. Follow guidelines to ensure each intent represents a single use case, avoids redundancy, and uses clear naming. Review recommendations to manage conflicts and optimize intent performance.

Intelligent triage leverages AI to automatically classify incoming tickets by intent, language and sentiment. The Zendesk Intent Model includes pre-trained intents across several industries, providing relevant intents and use cases tailored to each account's ticket data.

To give you greater flexibility over your available intents, you can create custom intents that address issues specific to your business needs. You can also add new categories and subcategories as you create custom intents so that you can keep your intents organized.

This article contains the following topics:

About custom intents
Creating a custom intent
Examples of custom intents

About custom intents

An intent is an AI-powered classification of what a ticket is about. While intelligent triage includes prebuilt intents for your industry, you can create custom intents to fill any gaps in the predefined list. Your custom intents are unique to your account and begin detecting incoming requests immediately upon activation.

To further fine tune your intents, you can also review and accept intent recommendations made by intelligent triage.

Intents 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 intents

To maintain a high-quality intent library, follow these guidelines and best practices when creating or editing custom intents:

Intent guidelines

Guideline	Description
Represent a single use case	Each intent should be defined for only one use case. Avoid combining multiple scenarios into one intent. This ensures that the intent is meaningful and actionable within your workflows. See Examples of custom intents.
Optimize for operational clarity	Intents 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 intents to match those processes.
Remove ambiguity	Intent 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 intent includes and its primary purpose. Keep both the name and description closely aligned and focused on defining the intent, rather than listing exclusions or unrelated scenarios.
Avoid redundancy	Check whether a similar intent already exists. Similar or overlapping intents can lead to low-confidence or wrong intent detection. Additionally, creating a high number of custom intents can lead to performance issues.

Intent best practices

Use the default intents provided. Modify these intents 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 an intent, make sure the same user request is represented.
Create custom intents when the user request you want to detect isn't represented in the list of intents available in your account.
Deactivate intents that aren't useful, that don't fit your business, or are redundant.
Use the recommendations tab to review new intent suggestions, and to understand if you have conflicts (overlap or duplicate) between intents.
Keep in mind that every time you make a change to an intent, it's reassessed for conflicts.

Creating a custom intent

To create a custom intent, you must have intents turned on.

Review the guidelines and best practices before creating a custom intent.

To create a custom intent

In Admin Center, click AI in the sidebar, then select Intelligent triage > Intent.
Click Create intent.
The Create custom intent page opens.
Enter a Name.
Use a short, descriptive name for the intent. The intent name is visible to agents, so make sure it’s clear and concise so they can quickly understand it.

Note: Custom intents 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 intent 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.
Intents are organized hierarchically in three levels: category, subcategory, and intent. The category is the broad reason for an incoming request, the subcategory provides a more detailed breakdown of the reason, and the intent 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.
Click Create custom intent.
The new intent is added to the Intent list tab and is labeled Custom.

Examples of custom intents

Below are some examples of well-defined custom intents:

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.