How to build Freshdesk workflows to tag tickets from social by topic

Let's be honest, managing customer support tickets from social media can feel like you're trying to direct traffic in the middle of a city-wide parade. The requests are unstructured, they’re often urgent, and they come at you from all sides. Without a solid system for sorting them, your Freshdesk inbox becomes a chaotic mix of DMs and mentions, making it nearly impossible to spot trends or get the right issues to the right people.

The secret to taming this chaos is to build smart Freshdesk workflows to tag tickets from social by topic. This guide will walk you through the different ways to do it, from using Freshdesk's own features to bringing in the power of AI, so you can turn that messy social feed into a stream of organized, actionable tickets.

What is ticket tagging in Freshdesk?

In Freshdesk, a "tag" is just a simple label you can pop onto a ticket to give it some context. Think of them as keywords that tell you what a ticket is about at a glance. For instance, you might use tags like "billing-question", "bug-report", or "feature-request".

This simple act of labeling is a bigger deal than it sounds for a few reasons:

• Smarter routing: Tags can trigger rules that automatically send a ticket to the right person or department. A "billing-question" tag, for example, can zip that ticket straight over to the finance team without anyone having to touch it.

• Clearer priorities: You can set up views and workflows based on tags to help your team focus on what's most important, like tickets flagged with an "urgent-issue" tag.

• Helpful reporting: Tags are gold for analytics. By keeping an eye on the volume of tickets with certain tags, you can identify common problems, get a better grasp of customer needs, and spot trends. For social media, this could be the lightbulb moment when you realize most of your Instagram DMs are about "shipping-delays".

While you can always add tags by hand, the real magic happens when you automate the process. A good tagging workflow keeps everything consistent, saves your agents a ton of time, and just makes your whole support operation run smoother.

Using native Freshdesk workflows

Freshdesk has some built-in automation tools that let you create basic workflows for tagging tickets. These rules are a decent place to start and can handle simple sorting based on conditions you set.

You’ll find what you need under Admin > Workflows > Automations in the "Ticket Creation" section. This is where you can build rules that automatically apply tags to new tickets as soon as they come in.

How to set up native workflows

For social media tickets, the easiest condition to use is the ticket's "Source."

1. Head over to Admin > Workflows > Automations.

2. Click on the Ticket Creation tab and select New Rule.

3. Give your rule a clear name, like "Tag Incoming Tweets."

4. In the "On tickets with these properties" section, set the condition to: Source is Twitter.

5. Under the "Perform these actions" section, choose Add tag and type in the tag you want to use, like "social-media-inquiry".

The Freshdesk automation rule editor showing how to build Freshdesk workflows to tag tickets from social by topic.

You can repeat this process to create similar rules for your other social channels, like Facebook.

The limitations of native Freshdesk workflows

Here’s where you’ll probably hit a wall. While these built-in automations are useful, they're purely rule-based. They lack any real understanding of the ticket's content. They can tell you that a ticket came from Twitter, but they have no clue what the tweet is actually about.

This means you can't automatically tag tickets by topic. A tweet asking about your pricing and another one reporting a bug will both get slapped with the same generic "social-media-inquiry" tag. This leaves your agents with the tedious job of reading every single ticket to figure out the real issue and then manually apply more specific tags like "pricing" or "bug". And you're not alone in feeling this frustration; it's a common pain point for teams, as many users on the Freshworks Community forum have pointed out.

Building advanced workflows with third-party tools

To get around the limits of Freshdesk's native rules, many teams get creative with a multi-tool setup. This usually involves a platform like Zapier to connect Freshdesk with a Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool like MonkeyLearn, which allows for true topic analysis.

How advanced workflows work

A typical workflow with this setup looks something like this:

1. A new ticket is created in Freshdesk from a social media channel.

2. A Zapier "zap" sees the new ticket and kicks into action.

3. Zapier sends the ticket's text (the tweet or Facebook post) over to an NLP service for analysis.

4. The NLP tool reads the text and figures out the topic (e.g., "Login Issue") and maybe even the sentiment (e.g., "Negative").

5. Zapier gets the analysis back and updates the original Freshdesk ticket with the right tags.

This method, often shared by resourceful users on places like Reddit, is undeniably powerful. It enables genuinely automated, topic-based tagging.

The downside of a DIY approach

While this DIY approach is clever, it comes with a few headaches. You're now juggling three separate platforms (Freshdesk, Zapier, and an NLP tool), and each comes with its own subscription, interface, and potential breaking points.

The costs can also add up faster than you'd think. You'll likely need paid plans for all three services, and those costs often grow as your ticket volume increases. On top of that, you're on the hook for maintenance. If one tool updates its API or an integration just stops working, it's up to you to figure it out and fix it. It's a big step up from the basic rules, but it's far from a simple, clean solution.

The integrated AI approach

The most modern and straightforward solution is to use an AI platform built to plug directly into your help desk. This approach gives you all the power of language analysis without the hassle of managing a clunky, multi-tool setup.

This is where a tool like eesel AI comes into play. It connects directly with your Freshdesk account and uses AI to understand and automate your ticket workflows from the inside.

Using eesel AI for intelligent workflows

The AI Triage product from eesel AI is designed for exactly this job. It reads every new ticket, including all your social media chatter, figures out what the customer needs, and then automatically adds the right tags.

Here’s why this approach works so well:

• You can get started in minutes. Unlike the DIY method, eesel AI offers a one-click integration with Freshdesk. You can be up and running fast, and you don't need to be an automation whiz to do it. The platform is completely self-serve, so you can configure everything yourself without having to schedule a sales call.

• The AI learns from your team. eesel AI trains itself on your past support tickets. This means it learns your specific customer issues, your product lingo, and even your brand's voice. The result is incredibly accurate, context-aware tagging that a generic NLP model just can't replicate.

• You can test it risk-free. Before you flip the switch on automation, eesel AI's simulation mode lets you test your tagging rules on thousands of your past tickets. This gives you a clear forecast of how the AI will perform, so you can tweak its behavior and roll it out feeling confident. You can start small by automating tags for just one topic and expand from there.

• It does more than just tag. Once eesel AI knows a ticket's topic, it can do more than just add a label. It can automatically route the ticket to the right agent, change its priority, or even help draft a response using the AI Copilot. This turns a simple tagging workflow into a full-blown automation engine.

eesel AI's Copilot integrated within Freshdesk, showing how it can draft replies and apply tags automatically based on Freshdesk workflows to tag tickets from social by topic.

For businesses that want to build scalable and accurate Freshdesk workflows to tag tickets from social by topic, an integrated AI platform like eesel AI is a powerful, simple, and cost-effective solution that other methods can't quite match.

Comparing different workflow options

Choosing the right path really depends on your team's size, budget, and how much time you have for setup and maintenance. Here’s a quick comparison to help you weigh the options.

Automate your Freshdesk workflows to tag tickets from social by topic

Look, manually tagging every social media ticket that comes into Freshdesk just isn't sustainable. It leads to agent burnout and means you're likely missing out on valuable insights from all that customer feedback.

While Freshdesk’s built-in workflows are a good first step, they can't tell you what your customers are actually talking about. DIY solutions can solve that problem, but they introduce a new layer of complexity and cost that can be a pain to manage.

For teams that are serious about getting efficient, an integrated AI platform is the clear winner. By using a tool like eesel AI, you can build truly intelligent Freshdesk workflows with very little effort. Its ability to learn from your data, let you test its performance beforehand, and offer a simple, self-serve setup makes it a much smoother path to automation.

Instead of just labeling chaos, you can finally automate it. That frees up your agents to focus on what they do best: actually helping your customers.

Ready to see how AI can clean up your Freshdesk workflows? Try eesel AI and discover how you can automate ticket tagging, routing, and responses in just a few minutes.