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Create custom intents

Last Update: Aug 2024 • Est. Read Time: 4 MIN
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Kustomer provides predefined intents so that you can quickly set up your conversational assistant to understand customers' needs and get them the information they need quicker. 

Your organization may have additional use cases that require you to create unique intents to better detect customer queries. Using both keywords and phrases, you can create up to 80 custom intents. 

Who can access this feature?
User typesOnly users with access to Intents can create a new intent for use with an assistant. For more information, see Define user access.
Plan availability  Professional  Business  Enterprise  Ultimate


In this article, we will show you how a cookie store can set up an intent that redirects customers to an agent when they inquire about the available flavors.

In this article

Create keyword intents

You can create intents that contain the words, or groups of words, you want the assistant to listen for during the conversation. We recommend using keywords when you know where the customer should be directed once their intent is detected. For example, a customer entering "help" should always match a help intent.

  1. Go to Settings> Kustomer IQ > Conversational Assistants.
  2. Go to the Intents tab and then select Add Intent.
  3. Enter an intent name and add the keywords you want to train the conversational assistant to detect. Since we are creating an intent that detects when a customer is inquiring about the cookie flavors available, suggested keywords for this can be: flavor, taste, sweet, salty, light, and ingredient
    Please keep the following in mind when creating keywords:
    • You can enter up to 15 keywords per language. You can activate additional languages in your Kustomer organization on the Localization page. For more information, see Customize localization settings.
    • A keyword must have a minimum of 2 characters and a maximum of 35.
    • An intent can only be used once in an assistant.
    • A keyword can only be used in one intent.
    • If entering a keyword with multiple words, the words must be used in that exact sequence for the assistant to detect it successfully. For example, "credit card" will not be detected if the customer enters "can I please get a credit on my card?"
  4. Select Save and Train Intent.

    Note: You can also create an intent directly within a dialog. If you do so, select Add Interaction to specify where the conversation directs the customer if one of the keywords is detected. For more information on what's available, see Conversational assistant interactions.

Detect common phrases

You can also create intents that detect customers' common phrases in their inquiries. Phrases complement keywords and help create stronger intents by training the assistant to understand how a customer might word an inquiry differently. When creating phrases, the more example phrases you have, the better the training will be. We require you to create at least 5 phrases and recommend creating at least 12 different variations of phrases to ensure you have enough variety to train the assistant properly. 

See Best practices for creating intents for tips on creating phrases for intent detection.

Notes: English is currently the only language supported.

  1. From the Intents tab, select Phrases.
  2. Select Add Phrase and enter the phrases you want the conversational assistant to detect. 
    For our example, we want to use phrases a customer would use when asking about cookie flavors. Suggested phrases could be:
    • What flavors do you have?
    • What do the cookies taste like?
    • Do you have anything with almonds?
    • Do you have light cookies?
    • How many types of cookies are there?
  3. Select Save and Train Intent.
    Once you save your changes, training the assistant on your new phrases may take some time. You can check the training status by going to the Phrases tab for the intent.

Understand the intent

Once you create the intent, you must add an interaction in the conversation path that will "listen" for the trained keywords. We recommend adding 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

To add an interaction that detects intent:

  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 is inquiring about cookie flavors, let's add an interaction that prompts them to enter a few words describing why they are contacting you.
  3. In the Welcome dialog, select Add Interaction > Text question.
  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 the assistant uses to continue the conversation based on the keyword it understood from your saved intents.

  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, if a customer uses one of the return keywords in the conversation, the assistant will automatically detect it and redirect it to an agent. You can easily view which dialogs are listening for intent by looking for the AI icon, which indicates that an intent redirects the conversation to it. You can hover over the icon to see exactly which intent is used.