Detect intent with a conversational assistant

Last Update: Oct 2024 • Est. Read Time: 5 MIN
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With intents, Customer Assist can understand when customers enter specific words or phrases in the conversation and redirect them to a specific dialog so that they can get the correct answer to their original query. You can choose from a list of predefined intents, or create up to 80 intents of your own. 

Who can access this feature?
User typesOnly users with access to Intents can create a new intent to use with an assistant. For more information, see Define user access.


In this article

Use predefined intents

Kustomer provides an automatic way for your conversational assistants to detect your customer's needs using a list of predefined intents. The language model can understand sentence variations, differences in capitalization, alternative spellings for words (color vs colour), and typos in words. 

This table lists all available intents and an example customer query for each one.

Intent nameDescription
Cancel order

Use when a customer has inquiries about canceling an order. For example:

What do I need to do to cancel order XXEE444?

Change order

Use when a customer wants to make a change to an order. For example:

Can I add something to order XXEE444?

Change shipping address

Use when a customer wants to make a change to a shipping address. For example:

I need help updating my shipping address.

Check cancellation fee

Use when a customer asks to check cancellation fees. For example:

I don't know how to see the cancellation fee.

Check invoice

Use when a customer is asking for an order invoice. For example:

I want to check my latest invoice.

Check payment methods

Use when a customer wants to know which payment methods are supported. For example:

Help me check payment options.

Check refund policy

Use when a customer wants to know the current refund policy. For example:

Help me check in what scenarios I can request a refund.

Complaint

Use when a customer is unsatisfied with their service. For example:

My experience with your service was bad, fI want to file a claim.

Contact customer service

Use when a customer wants to know how to contact your customer support service. For example:

I need to see what hours I can reach customer support.

Contact human agent

Use when a customer wants to talk to a real person, not a chatbot. For example:

May I speak to an agent?

Create account

Use when a customer has problems creating an account. For example:

I cannot create a free account.

Delete account

Use when a customer wants to delete the account created in your service/web. For example:

I do not need the gold account and want assistance canceling it.

Delivery options

Use when a customer wants to know the available delivery options provided by your company. For example:

Is it possible to place an order from Seattle?

Edit account information

Use when a customer wants to change the information they have in their account. For example:

Edit details on my pro account.

Get invoice

Use when a customer wants an invoice for their order. For example:

I don't know how to download my bill.

Get refund

Use when a customer asks for an order refund. For example:

I need assistance getting my money back.

Newsletter subscription

Use when a customer wants information about your newsletter or email communications. For example:

How can I cancel my subscription to the company newsletter?

Payment issue

Use when a customer has a problem related to payments. For example:

I'm having trouble with my online payment and need help.

Place order

Use when a customer needs assistance to place an order. For example:

Can you help me order some of your items?

Recover password

Use when a customer wants to recover their account password. For example:

Can you help me reset the key for my user profile?

Registration problems

Use when a customer has problems signing up for your service or website. For example:

What do I need to do to notify you of issues with signup?

Product review/feedback

Use when customers want to provide feedback related to a product or service. For example:

I need help sending some feedback for your products.

Set up shipping address

Use when a customer wants to add a new delivery address to your system. For example:

The new delivery address isn't valid, can I get some help?

Switch account and account upgrades

Use when a customer with multiple accounts wants to log in with a different account type. For example:

Change to Freemium account.

Where is my order

Use when a customer wants to track the status of an order. For example:

Want assistance checking my order status.

Track my refund

Use when a customer wants to know in which step of the process the refund is. For example:

I am waiting for a refund of 299 dollars


Create your custom intents

If you have additional use cases that cannot be solved using our list of predefined intents, you can create your own using unique keywords and phrases. For more information, see Create custom intents.

Understand the intent

For the conversational assistant to have the ability to detect a customer's needs, you have to add an interaction in the conversation path that will "listen" for the intent.  We recommend you add this step early on in your path.

Note: The ability to understand intent is only available for the following interactions:

  • AI response (See this article for more information on using AI to respond to customer inquiries.)
  • Customer text response
  • Article Deflection

Let's set up an intent that redirects customers looking to return an item to an agent.

  1. Open the assistant you want to use the intent with or create a new one.
  2. Since we are creating a conversation path to detect if a customer wants to return an item, let's add an interaction that prompts the customer to enter a few words describing why they are contacting you.
  3. In the Welcome dialog, select Add Interaction > Customer Text Response.
  4. Enter a message to prompt the customer to respond. In this example, we ask "What can we help you with today?"
  5. Turn on Understand Intents. The AI icon will appear, indicating that this interaction will help you understand your customer's input.

Redirect the customer if the intent is detected

The final step is to create the dialog that the assistant uses to continue the conversation based on the intent you want to detect.

  1. Select Add Dialog and then choose the desired intent from the drop-down menu.
  2. Select the dialog the assistant redirects the customer to if the intent is detected. In this example, we will transfer them to the next available agent.

    Note: You do not need to have this dialog linked to another one since it will continue the conversation only if the intent is detected.

Now, the assistant will automatically detect if a customer requests a refund and redirect them to an agent. You can easily view which dialogs are listening for an intent by looking for the the robot icon , which indicates that an intent redirects the conversation to it. You can hover over the icon to see which intent is used.

Define fallback behavior when an intent isn't detected

Note: This option is only available for WhatsApp.

You can define what occurs if a customer's reply does not match an existing intent by going to an assistant, selecting Assistant Settings, and opening the Behavior tab. You can pick from one of two options:

  • Redirect the customer to another dialog within the same conversational assistant.
  • Continue to the next interaction in the dialog.

Manage your intents

You can manage your intents by going to Settings> Kustomer IQ > Customer Assist and opening the Custom Intents tab. Here, you can see all the intents you have created, the assistant(s) currently using it, and the number of actively detected languages.

You can select the edit icon to modify the intent, check its training status, or delete it completely. When modifying the intent, remember that the changes will affect all of the assistants using it.