A practical guide on how to use Freshdesk AI to classify billing vs technical questions

Every minute your team spends trying to figure out if a ticket is about "billing" or something "technical" is a minute a customer is just… waiting. We’ve all seen it happen. A simple question gets tossed between departments like a hot potato, and you can almost feel the customer's patience wearing thin on the other end.

Getting the routing wrong isn’t just a bit inefficient; it’s a recipe for a bad customer experience and a waste of your team's valuable time.

The good news is that tools like Freshdesk have some built-in AI that’s meant to help automate this exact kind of sorting. If you set it up just right, it can definitely help clean up the mess.

This guide will walk you through the steps to get Freshdesk's own AI working for you. But we'll also be honest about the common snags you’ll probably hit and show you a much better way to get this done in minutes, not hours.

What you'll need

Before we jump in, let's make sure you have everything you need to actually use Freshdesk's native AI features for sorting tickets. These tools aren't on every plan, so it's best to check first.

Here’s your checklist:

• A Freshdesk account on the Pro or Enterprise plan. It's important to know these features are not included in the Free or Growth plans, so you’ll need to be on one of the higher tiers.

• The Freddy AI Copilot add-on. This is an extra monthly cost, usually around $29 per agent, that you'll pay on top of your regular subscription.

• Administrator access to your Freshdesk account. You'll need this to get in and set up the rules and automations.

• A really clear idea of what counts as a "billing" vs. a "technical" question for your company. It sounds simple, but you’d be surprised how often those lines can get blurry.

How to use Freshdesk AI to classify billing vs technical questions: A step-by-step guide

Okay, once you've confirmed you have the right plan and permissions, you can start building your automation. Here’s how you get it done inside Freshdesk.

Step 1: Know the Freshdesk AI tools

Freshdesk's automation really comes down to two main features in its Freddy AI suite: Auto Triage and the Email AI Agent.

Auto Triage is supposed to learn from your team’s past actions. In theory, it watches how you categorize, prioritize, and route tickets and then starts suggesting those fields for new incoming tickets.

The Email AI Agent is more about generating automatic replies to emails. Its ability to classify a ticket correctly, though, depends entirely on the rules you build and how good your knowledge base articles are.

Both are decent tools, but they need a lot of careful, manual setup to handle something as nuanced as telling a billing problem apart from a technical one.

Step 2: Set up ticket rules

This is where you have to roll up your sleeves. You essentially need to teach Freshdesk what to look for by creating rules based on specific keywords.

1. Head over to Admin > Workflows > Automations.

2. Click on the Ticket Creation tab and set up a new rule.

3. Now, create conditions that search for keywords in the ticket's subject or description. For instance:

   • For Billing: "If 'Subject' or 'Description' contains 'invoice', 'payment', 'refund', 'subscription', 'charge' -> Set 'Type' to 'Billing'."

   • For Technical: "If 'Subject' or 'Description' contains 'error', 'bug', 'API', 'not working', 'login issue' -> Set 'Type' to 'Technical'."

You can probably already see the problem here. What happens when a customer writes, "My payment failed because of an API error?" A simple keyword rule gets confused. It sees both "payment" and "API error" and basically has to guess, which can lead to the same misrouting you were trying to fix.

Step 3: Use the knowledge base

After a ticket is classified, you might want the Email AI Agent to send an initial reply. This can be a nice touch to let customers know you’ve received their message and maybe even solve the issue right away.

To make this work, you need a spotless knowledge base with articles that are clearly tagged for both "billing" and "technical" topics. The AI agent scans these articles to find something relevant and drafts a response.

But here’s the catch: this whole system is only as smart as your knowledge base. If your help articles are out of date, incomplete, or just plain confusing, the AI will send unhelpful or incorrect answers. That's not just a bad look; it can make a frustrating situation even worse for the customer.

Step 4: Tweak your rules

Setting up these rules is not a one-and-done task. You'll need to pop into your Freshdesk Analytics regularly to see how many tickets are being sent to the wrong place and try to figure out why.

As your business evolves, you’ll get questions about new products, features, and problems. That means you’ll be stuck constantly updating your automation rules just to keep up. This ongoing maintenance is a hidden time-suck that comes with rule-based systems.

A faster way than using Freshdesk AI to classify billing vs technical questions

The Freshdesk method can get you part of the way there, but as we've seen, it's often rigid, time-consuming to set up, and can break easily. Let's look at a more modern approach that’s built on real AI and avoids these headaches.

A workflow diagram showing how eesel AI integrates with helpdesks to automate ticket classification.

Mistake #1: Relying on keywords

A ticket about a "failed subscription charge" could be a straightforward billing question or a nasty bug in your payment processor. A system based only on keywords just can't see the difference. It spots "subscription" and "charge" and immediately files it under billing, even if the billing team has no way to fix the technical error causing the problem.

A better way: Instead of wrestling with fragile keyword rules, a smarter AI can learn from your team's collective brainpower. For example, eesel AI connects directly to your Freshdesk integration and analyzes your entire ticket history. It doesn't just look for keywords; it understands the full context from thousands of past conversations. By seeing how your team has actually handled similar issues before, it classifies new tickets with a level of accuracy that feels human, right from the start.

A screenshot showing how eesel AI analyzes past ticket history to improve classification accuracy.

Mistake #2: Launching and hoping

Imagine this: you flip the switch on a new automation rule in Freshdesk. But a tiny mistake in your logic causes it to quietly send hundreds of tickets to the wrong team over the weekend. By Monday morning, you’re dealing with a mountain of angry customers and a massive cleanup job. With the native tools, there's no safe way to see what your rules will do before they go live.

A better way: You should never have to automate blindly. With eesel AI’s powerful simulation mode, you can test your setup on thousands of your own historical tickets in a safe environment. Before a single live ticket is touched, you get a clear report showing exactly how the AI would have tagged, triaged, and responded. This lets you adjust the logic with confidence and go live knowing exactly what will happen.

A screenshot of eesel AI's simulation mode, which allows users to test their automation setup safely.

Pro tip: Bring all your knowledge together

But let's be real, the answers your team needs are rarely all in one place. Critical info for solving tough issues often lives somewhere else:

• Technical: Engineering docs in Confluence or step-by-step guides in Google Docs.

• Billing: Policy documents or customer-specific notes that are definitely not stored in the helpdesk.

A better way: Genuinely helpful AI automation needs access to all your company knowledge, no matter where it is. eesel AI connects all those scattered sources. It can plug into over 100 platforms, so when it classifies a ticket, it’s using the full picture. This doesn't just make the classification more accurate, it also allows the AI to pull the right information to solve the ticket completely, often without an agent ever getting involved.

An infographic showing how eesel AI integrates knowledge from multiple sources to enhance ticket classification.

Moving beyond Freshdesk AI's basic rules

Freshdesk gives you some basic tools for ticket classification, but they demand a lot of manual setup, rely on clunky logic, and need constant babysitting. The dependence on keywords, the risk of sending tickets to the wrong team, and the inability to see knowledge outside of Freshdesk can seriously slow your team down.

It’s time to move past basic rules. Modern tools like eesel AI are designed for the messy reality of customer support. With features like learning from your ticket history, risk-free simulations, and a unified knowledge source, eesel AI’s AI Triage and AI Agent products are built to handle complex classification without the headache. You can get started in minutes, connect all your docs with a click, and finally automate with confidence.

Ready to try a smarter approach?

Stop fighting with manual rules and see what smart automation can really do for you. Try eesel AI for free and run a simulation on your own Freshdesk tickets today to see just how many hours you can get back.