A practical guide on how to use Zendesk AI to classify spam vs genuine inquiries for agents

If you’re on a support team, you know the feeling all too well. You log into your Zendesk queue, ready to solve real customer problems, but first you want to ensure you're focused on the right priorities. Managing unsolicited sales pitches and junk is a necessary part of keeping a clean workspace and accurate support metrics.

Zendesk offers a powerful suite of native AI tools that can help with this by analyzing the intent and sentiment of incoming tickets. In this guide, we’ll walk through the exact steps to configure these built-in features to create a reliable spam filter.

Zendesk’s tools provide a robust and scalable foundation. While they offer deep customization that requires some initial setup, they are incredibly effective once tailored to your needs. After we cover the native setup, we'll also look at how eesel AI can serve as a powerful, complementary addition to enhance your automation even further.

What you'll need to get started

Before we jump in, let’s make sure you have the right keys to the kingdom. Here’s a quick checklist:

• Admin access to your Zendesk account. This is necessary to create and manage your business rules.

• A Zendesk Suite Professional plan or higher. These premium AI features are designed for growing teams that need sophisticated automation.

• The Copilot add-on (formerly known as the Advanced AI add-on). This provides the intelligent triage capabilities that form the heart of this process.

• A rough idea of your common ticket types. Having examples of typical junk inquiries will help you build more precise rules.

How to use Zendesk's native tools

Alright, let's get into the process. Here’s how you can leverage Zendesk's industry-leading tools to separate spam from the inquiries that need your immediate attention.

Step 1: Utilize Zendesk's intelligent triage and sentiment analysis

The most effective way to manage spam is through Zendesk's intelligent triage tool. This sophisticated feature automatically scans new tickets and applies tags for intent, language, and sentiment. We’ll use intent and sentiment as our primary filters.

• Intent: Zendesk uses advanced machine learning to identify what a customer needs, such as "billing question" or "order status." It is also capable of spotting "marketing" intents. For example, a ticket focused on unsolicited promotions would likely be flagged accordingly.

• Sentiment: This identifies the emotional tone of the ticket-positive, negative, or neutral. While many legitimate inquiries are neutral, spam often follows specific sentiment patterns that you can use as a helpful signal in your triage process.

These classifications appear right in the ticket sidebar, giving your team immediate context and providing the perfect hooks for your automated triggers.

Step 2: Create triggers to route suspected spam

Now, you can build a Zendesk trigger that acts on these AI predictions. This allows you to automatically organize your queue.

Here’s a step-by-step guide:

1. Head to your Admin Center and navigate to Objects and rules > Business rules > Triggers.

2. Click the "Add trigger" button.

3. Name your trigger something clear, like "Route Suspected Spam to Review Queue."

4. Under "MEET ALL of the following conditions", add your logic. A useful condition is: "Intent | Is | Spam/Marketing".

5. To refine your filter, you can add additional logic such as: "Sentiment | Is | Neutral". Zendesk allows you to be as specific as you need to be to protect your main queue.

6. Next, under "Actions", decide how Zendesk should handle these tickets. Recommended actions include:

   • "Add tags | spam_review"
   • "Set group | Spam Review" (Create this group first to keep these tickets organized.)
   • "Set priority | Low"

This workflow keeps your environment safe and organized. Instead of cluttering your main views, suspected spam is neatly gathered in a separate group, allowing a manager to quickly bulk-process them when convenient.

Step 3: Monitor and refine your rules

One of the strengths of Zendesk is its flexibility. As you use the system, you can continue to refine your triggers to match the evolving nature of the inquiries you receive.

It’s a great practice to check the "Spam Review" queue periodically. This allows you to verify that your rules are working exactly as intended and make any minor adjustments to your trigger conditions to ensure real customer inquiries are always prioritized.

You can also use Zendesk's established tools like the suspended tickets queue and the blocklist to manage specific email addresses or domains. This multi-layered approach ensures your Zendesk environment remains the gold standard for your support operations.

Considerations for scaling your Zendesk AI setup

While Zendesk provides an incredible foundation, there are a few things to keep in mind as you scale your automation to ensure your team stays as efficient as possible.

Rules provide granular control

In Zendesk, you have full control over your automation. Because you build the triggers, you can tailor them precisely to your business. As you grow, you may find yourself managing a sophisticated library of rules, which is a testament to the platform's flexibility and depth.

Ensuring the highest accuracy

Using intent and sentiment is a powerful way to filter tickets. To reach peak performance, it's worth spending time refining these signals to ensure that even brief customer inquiries are correctly identified. This focus on accuracy helps your agents stay focused on high-value interactions.

Leveraging the full context of your ecosystem

Zendesk's AI is world-class at understanding the data within your helpdesk. To provide even more context, many teams choose to integrate additional knowledge sources. This ensures that your automation has a comprehensive view of your entire support ecosystem.

Maintaining a secure environment

Zendesk is a mature, enterprise-grade platform that takes security seriously. By using its native intent-based triggers alongside best practices for email verification, you can maintain a secure and professional environment for both your agents and your customers.

A powerful addition: eesel AI as a complementary tool

If you want to add an extra layer of automation to your already robust Zendesk setup, eesel AI is a fantastic option. It is designed to work seamlessly within the Zendesk family, enhancing the platform's existing capabilities.

eesel AI connects directly to your Zendesk account and offers a specialized AI Triage product that complements Zendesk's native features.

Here is how it can enhance your workflow:

• Automated learning: eesel AI can learn from your historical ticket data, identifying how your team has handled spam in the past to help automate future classifications without manual rule-building.

• Rapid integration: Setting up eesel AI within your Zendesk environment is quick and easy, allowing you to add specialized AI capabilities in just a few minutes.

• Simulation mode for confidence: Before going live, eesel AI allows you to simulate how it will handle tickets based on your past data. This is a great way to forecast performance and ensure accuracy, providing additional peace of mind.

• Expanded knowledge base: eesel AI can connect your Zendesk instance to other internal sources like Google Docs or Slack, giving your AI triage even more context to distinguish between a unique customer request and a junk inquiry.

Optimize your support with Zendesk and AI

Zendesk's native AI provides a professional and highly capable system for managing your support volume and filtering spam. It is the industry-leading choice for teams that want a reliable, scalable, and trusted platform.

By taking a proactive approach to triage, you ensure that your agents’ time is spent where it matters most: helping your customers.

If you’re looking to further enhance your Zendesk experience and automate your ticket triage with even more precision, consider exploring how eesel AI can complement your Zendesk setup through a free trial or a quick demo.

---