Introduction

As covered in previous articles, Zendesk has recently released a host of new AI-powered features as part of their Advanced AI add-on. Among these is intelligent triage, a powerful tool that lets administrators route tickets to the right teams/agents based on keywords, sentiment, intent and even language.

The potential benefits offered by this tool are pretty clear from the outset. Many customer service teams have agents dedicated to scrolling through unsorted tickets and manually assigning each ticket to the appropriate team. With intelligent triage, Zendesk can do this work for you.

Alternatively, you might not feel that you need every ticket to be automatically triaged but instead want to set up a rule that sends any new tickets with a negative sentiment and a specific keyword to your escalations team.

In this article, we’ll cover exactly what intelligent triage is, why it’s so powerful, and how you can set it up like a pro to save you and your team from hundreds of hours tagging tickets.

What is intelligent triage?

Intelligent triage is part of Zendesk’s new Advanced AI add-on, meaning it’s only available to those on the Professional or Enterprise suites, and even then it’s an extra cost per agent.

Intelligent triage is actually a combination of multiple features working together. Let’s break them down into their component parts.

‍

Automatic ticket assessment

First of all, Zendesk will read each ticket and assess it for up to four factors: Language, Language confidence, Sentiment and Sentiment confidence.

‍

‍

Language is simply the language that the received ticket is written in.

Language confidence is how confident Zendesk is that its assessment on the language is correct.

Sentiment indicates whether the general sentiment/tone of the tickets is negative, neutral or positive.

Sentiment confidence is how confident Zendesk is that its assessment on the sentiment is correct.

We’ll come on to why Language confidence and Sentiment confidence are useful later, in Part 2.

‍

Intelligence-based triggers

The second component of intelligent triage is Zendesk checking the above four attributes, as well as any other ticket attributes, against your triggers.

For example, you may want to create a trigger that says: if the ticket is from support@yourcompany.com, the Sentiment is negative and the Sentiment confidence is Medium or High, set the ticket priority to high and assign it to your escalations team.

‍

‍

In a nutshell, that’s what intelligent triage does. It ensures that tickets are automatically routed to the correct team to be answered right away.

‍

Why intelligent triage is such a welcome feature

By automating ticket categorization and routing, it saves agents from the cumbersome task of manual sorting, famously one of agents’ least-favourite tasks. Furthermore, agents can often become bored with the task of manually categorising tickets, causing them to not fully read tickets and then taking a guess at the ticket’s category, sometimes getting it wrong. Zendesk AI doesn’t face such problems! As a result, agent time is freed up, allowing them to spend longer on giving better, more bespoke responses to customers.

On top of this, intelligent triage's multilingual comprehension gives it an edge over agents who typically struggle to identify multiple foreign languages. Zendesk reads and comprehends languages using the whole world wide web as its reference, ensuring that no ticket is misrouted due to language incomprehension. This feature allows global companies to offer localised support without the need to separate out contact centres or Zendesk instances.

Finally, the feature learns and gets smarter over time, continually enhancing accuracy. As it learns from your historical ticket data, its ability to categorise and route tickets is fine-tuned. This means that with each interaction, intelligent triage becomes a sharper, more efficient assistant to your support team.

Summary

In essence, Zendesk's intelligent triage is a powerful enhancement that empowers agents, saves time, removes language barriers and improves your whole Zendesk environment. It gets the right tickets to the right agents, and fast, saving your team and customers buckets of time in the process.

Stay tuned for Part 2, in which we’ll cover exactly how to set up intelligent triage to make the most of these great benefits.