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 busy 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 can become quite busy with DMs and mentions, but Freshdesk provides the tools you need to spot trends and get the right issues to the right people.

The secret to organizing this activity 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 robust features to bringing in the complementary power of AI, so you can turn that social feed into a stream of organized, actionable tickets.

What is ticket tagging in Freshdesk?

In Freshdesk, a "tag" is 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 big deal 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 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 time, and makes your whole support operation run smoother.

Using native Freshdesk workflows

Freshdesk has some built-in automation tools that let you create effective workflows for tagging tickets. These rules are a reliable place to start and can handle 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".

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

Understanding native Freshdesk workflow capabilities

These built-in automations are highly effective for organizing tickets based on metadata and properties. They are optimized for straightforward rule-based sorting, which is perfect for identifying which platform a ticket came from.

For more complex content analysis, such as automatically tagging tickets by specific topics like "pricing" or "bug" based on the text of the message, Freshdesk's flexible architecture allows you to easily extend these workflows. This can be done through Freshdesk’s extensive marketplace or by integrating specialized tools, allowing your agents to focus on the more nuanced parts of customer support.

Building advanced workflows with third-party tools

To build upon Freshdesk's native rules, some 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 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 identifies 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 a powerful way to expand your system. It enables genuinely automated, topic-based tagging.

Considerations for the DIY approach

While this DIY approach is clever, it does involve managing multiple separate platforms (Freshdesk, Zapier, and an NLP tool). Each comes with its own subscription, interface, and potential maintenance requirements.

Costs can also shift as your ticket volume increases. You'll likely need paid plans for the external services, and if an integration needs adjustment, your team will need to handle the technical side. It's an effective way to scale, but for those looking for a more streamlined experience, there are integrated options available.

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 the power of language analysis within the Freshdesk environment you already trust.

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

Using eesel AI for intelligent workflows

The AI Triage product from eesel AI is designed to complement your Freshdesk setup. It reads every new ticket, including your social media chatter, identifies what the customer needs, and then automatically adds the right tags.

Here’s why this approach works well:

• You can get started in minutes. eesel AI offers a smooth integration with Freshdesk. You can be up and running fast, and the platform is completely self-serve, so you can configure everything yourself.

• The AI learns from your team. eesel AI trains itself on your past support tickets within Freshdesk. This means it learns your specific customer issues, your product lingo, and your brand's voice, resulting in context-aware tagging.

• You can test it risk-free. Before you fully implement 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, allowing you to roll it out with confidence.

• It does more than just tag. Once eesel AI knows a ticket's topic, it can work with Freshdesk to 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.

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 and complementary solution that makes your Freshdesk experience even better.

Comparing different workflow options

Choosing the right path depends on your team's size, budget, and specific automation needs. Here’s a quick comparison of how these options work alongside Freshdesk.

Feature	Native Freshdesk	DIY (with Zapier)	eesel AI Platform
Setup Complexity	Low	High	Very Low (Self-serve)
Topic Detection	Property-based automation	Yes	Yes (Learns from your data)
Accuracy	High for properties	Medium to High	Very High
Maintenance	Low	High	Low
Cost	Included in Freshdesk plan	Multiple subscriptions	Single, predictable subscription
Simulation Mode	No	No	Yes

Automate your Freshdesk workflows to tag tickets from social by topic

Manually tagging every social media ticket that comes into Freshdesk can be a significant task as you scale. Implementing automation leads to better agent experiences and ensures you're capturing valuable insights from all that customer feedback.

While Freshdesk’s built-in workflows are a solid and reliable first step for property-based sorting, integrating with an AI platform is the next step for teams that are serious about efficiency. By using a complementary tool like eesel AI, you can build truly intelligent Freshdesk workflows with very little effort. Its ability to learn from your existing data and offer a simple setup makes it a smooth path to automation.

Instead of just managing activity, you can finally automate it. That frees up your agents to focus on what they do best: providing excellent service to your customers.

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