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Creating a Custom Intent



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Magda Pereira

Zendesk Product Manager

Posted Dec 11, 2024

Intents offer automated and consistent classification of incoming tickets and conversations. This will provide valuable insights into your ticket patterns, helping you identify the most relevant intents for your business. Additionally, it will streamline the triage process and, ultimately, reduce the volume of incoming tickets by enabling smarter automation.

With the option of adding custom intents, customers will now tailor intents to their unique business needs, enabling more precise automation and driving greater confidence in decision-making.

 

 

Requirements

  • You must be an Advanced AI customer, with an Intent model assigned. 
  • Sign-up with the Custom Intents EAP form, where you accepted the EAP agreements.
  • You must have intents turned on to create a custom intent.

 

 

To create a custom intent

  1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Intelligent triage.
  2. Click Intent.
  3. Select the Intent list tab.
  4. Click the Actions drop-down and select Create custom intent.
  5. The Create custom intent page opens.
  6. Fill in the following required fields. Forms submitted without all the fields will be declined.
    1. Name. A short, descriptive name for the intent. To see the intents currently available to you for comparison, see Viewing all intent, language, and sentiment values.
    2. Description. An explanation of the meaning behind the intent. Remember that an intent is a prediction of what the ticket is about.
    3. Category. The category and subcategory that the new intent applies to. After the custom intent is created, it will be placed under this category and subcategory.
    4. Tickets with this intent. Example tickets that the new intent applies to. You must list up to ten examples, and each ticket must:
      1. Have the full URL (for example, https://<yoursubdomain>.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/1)
      2. Come from the Email channel
      3. Be in English
      4. Have a subject and description
      5. Be unique (in other words, tickets can't be repeated) but must represent the same intent
  7. Click Create intent.

 

 

How does custom intent work?

The custom intent is being automatically added to the customer's account list of intents, and from that moment on, the intent model will take into consideration this new custom intent to predict the newly created tickets.

Our Zendesk Intent Model leverages Generative AI to understand the end-user message and link with the correct intent, be it a Zendesk intent or a custom intent.

All the custom intents added are account based and will not be available for other customers.

 

 

 

Guidelines

  • The intent should explain what the ticket is about, the main reason the end-user is reaching out. It should cover a single reason.
  • Intents are organized hierarchically in three levels: Category, Sub-category, and Intent. This structure helps in systematically grouping and managing incoming requests 
    • Category: The top-level grouping that includes broad reason of incoming requests.
    • Sub-category: Within each Category, Sub-categories provide a more detailed breakdown of the reason.
  • Provide a good intent name and description:
    • Be clear and descriptive.
    • When writing the description, clearly define what the intent should include and exclude. 
    • Make a description as if to be read by a first day agent that understands the meaning of the sentences but has little inside knowledge about the business.
    • Feel free to provide examples and common words users might use.
  • Before adding a custom intent, check if you already have that intent or a similar one in the list of intents provided by Zendesk.
    • Having similar or overlapping intents might lead to low confidence intent predictions, or wrong predictions. 
  • A custom intent should not be added to identify details of the ticket, such as product or service names, branch locations, or subscription type etc. (See entity detection for automatically identifying business critical information from your incoming requests)
  • The intent name will be visible for your agent, make sure it is clear and concise, so they quickly understand it.

 

Here are some examples:

  • Intent 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.

 

  • Intent 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.

 

  • Intent 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.

 

 

 

Known limitations for EAP

  • Create up to 50 custom intents 
    • There's a limitation that blocks the Admin from creating more than 50 custom intents.
  • Only English language supported
    • Custom intents created in English by the Admin are supported by Zendesk. Custom intents created in other languages, for now, are not supported.
    • Tickets with its content in English, will get a prediction, and are supported by Zendesk. 
      Tickets with its content in other languages, will get a prediction, for now, are not supported.
  • Unable to check conflicts between intents
    • Newly added custom intents prediction quality highly depends on the quality of the intent name, description, and ticket examples provided by the customer.
    • Newly custom intents aren't compared against Zendesk intents or even between other custom intents to understand if it might be duplicated or ambiguous.
  • Zendesk AI agents will not have custom intents predictions.

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