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 have to wade through a sea of junk: phishing attempts, unsolicited sales pitches, and just plain old spam. It's a daily ritual that eats up precious time, clutters your workspace, and skews your support metrics.

Zendesk does offer some native AI tools that can help with this mess by trying to figure out the intent and sentiment of incoming tickets. In this guide, we’ll walk through the exact steps to rig these built-in features into a basic spam filter.

But let’s be honest: Zendesk’s tools aren’t a silver bullet. They take a fair bit of manual setup and come with some pretty big limitations. So, after we cover the native setup, we'll look at a more powerful, genuinely automated way to solve this headache for good.

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. You won't be able to create or change business rules without it.

• A Zendesk Suite Professional plan or higher. The AI features we’re about to discuss aren't included in the lower-tier plans.

• The Copilot add-on (which used to be called the Advanced AI add-on). Key features like intelligent triage, which is the foundation of this whole process, are part of this paid add-on.

• A rough idea of what your typical spam looks like. It’s helpful to have a few examples handy to guide the rules you’re about to build.

How to use Zendesk's native tools

Alright, let's get into the nitty-gritty. Here’s how you can use Zendesk's built-in tools to build a system that separates spam from the tickets that actually matter.

Step 1: Get to know Zendesk's intelligent triage and sentiment analysis

First off, it's important to understand that Zendesk doesn't have a button labeled "detect spam." We have to get a little creative and use its intelligent triage tool. This feature scans new tickets and tags them with an intent, language, and sentiment. We’re going to focus on intent and sentiment.

• Intent: This is Zendesk’s best guess at what a customer wants. It might identify things like "billing question" or "order status." Spam often has a sales or marketing intent, which Zendesk can sometimes spot. For instance, a ticket with the subject "SKYROCKET YOUR SALES TODAY!!" would likely get flagged with a marketing-related intent.

• Sentiment: This gauges the emotional tone of the ticket, labeling it positive, negative, or neutral. A lot of spam has a weirdly neutral or overly positive vibe. A real, urgent ticket from a frustrated customer, on the other hand, is almost always going to be marked as negative.

These classifications appear in the ticket sidebar and are the hooks we'll use to build our automated rules. But keep in mind, this is an indirect way of finding spam. You're using signals designed for customer service to hunt for something they weren't really made for.

Step 2: Create triggers to route suspected spam

Now for the fun part. You’re going to build a Zendesk trigger that acts on the AI’s predictions to quarantine potential spam. Think of it as setting up a bouncer for your support queue.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to get it done:

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

2. Click the "Add trigger" button to get started.

3. Give your trigger a memorable name, like "Route Suspected Spam to a Holding Pen."

4. Under "MEET ALL of the following conditions", you'll add the logic. A common condition might be: "Intent | Is | Spam/Marketing" (or whatever similar intent Zendesk identifies for your spam).

5. If you notice a pattern where most of your spam has a particular tone, you could also try a condition like: "Sentiment | Is | Neutral". This can be a bit of a gamble since some legitimate (but short) requests might also be neutral, but it's an option.

6. Next, under the "Actions" section, you tell Zendesk what to do with these flagged tickets. Here are a few useful actions:

   • "Add tags | spam_review"
   • "Set group | Spam Review" (You'll need to create this group first if it doesn't exist.)
   • "Set priority | Low" This setup doesn’t just delete the spam, which would be risky. Instead, it shunts it over to a separate, low-priority queue. This lets a manager or agent pop into the "Spam Review" group once a day to bulk-delete the junk, which is way faster than picking it out of the main queue one by one.

Step 3: Monitor and adjust your rules and blocklists

This is definitely not a "set it and forget it" kind of fix. The success of your trigger hinges entirely on how well Zendesk's AI keeps up with new types of spam. You have to keep an eye on it.

Make it a weekly habit to check the "Spam Review" queue. Your main goal is to hunt for false positives, real customer tickets that your trigger accidentally tossed into the spam pile. If you find them, you'll have to go back and tweak your trigger conditions to be a bit more precise.

And don’t forget about Zendesk's old-school spam tools. You can still manually check the suspended tickets queue and add pesky email addresses or entire domains to your blocklist. The whole thing becomes a cycle of monitoring, tweaking, and maintaining lists. It’s better than nothing, but it’s still a time sink for you or your team.

The challenges of using Zendesk's native tools

While the method we just walked through can help, it's far from a perfect or truly automated fix. Sticking with Zendesk's native tools for spam filtering comes with some real drawbacks that can keep your team in a cycle of manual work.

You're still stuck building and maintaining the rules

Here's the main problem: you’re the one doing all the work. The Zendesk AI gives you a hint (the intent or sentiment), but you have to build, test, and constantly update every single trigger. When spammers get creative with new tactics, your rulebook gets longer and more complicated, and it quickly becomes a pain to manage.

You'll probably get a lot of false positives

Using intent and sentiment to catch spam is a bit like trying to catch a fly with a fishing net. It’s just not the right tool for the job. A perfectly valid, but brief, email from a potential customer asking "pricing?" could easily get flagged with a neutral sentiment and sent straight to your spam queue. That means your agents still have to spend time double-checking the junk folder, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of automation.

The AI has limited context

Zendesk's AI learns from your Zendesk data, and that's about it. It doesn't know what's in your Confluence pages, your internal guides in Google Docs, or the resolutions discussed in past Slack threads. This limited view gives it an incomplete picture of your business, which makes its predictions less accurate. It doesn't have a deep understanding of what a "genuine inquiry" looks like for your company because it's only seeing a tiny piece of the puzzle.

An infographic illustrating how a more advanced AI connects to multiple knowledge sources (Slack, Confluence, etc.) for better context, a key limitation when using Zendesk AI to classify spam vs genuine inquiries for agents.

Security and setup headaches

Research from the cybersecurity firm CloudSek recently pointed out that Zendesk’s trial infrastructure could be used for phishing campaigns because of how it handles unverified emails. A simple intent-based trigger might not be strong enough to catch a clever phishing email dressed up as a real customer issue. The whole setup is far from a simple plug-and-play solution and needs ongoing technical babysitting to work well.

A better way: Truly automate spam classification

Instead of getting tangled in a web of manual rules that you have to constantly manage, what if you could use a solution that automates spam detection right out of the box? That's exactly what eesel AI is built for.

eesel AI is a platform that connects directly to your Zendesk account and has a dedicated AI Triage product designed to handle this exact problem, without the manual labor.

Here’s what makes it different:

• It learns on its own: With eesel AI, you don't have to write a single rule. It learns from how your team has already handled tickets. It analyzes thousands of your past conversations, sees which tickets were marked as spam and closed, and automatically figures out how to spot those patterns in the future.

• You can be live in minutes: Forget about that multi-step setup process. Onboarding with eesel AI is completely self-serve. You connect your Zendesk account with a click and can be up and running in minutes, not hours or days.

• Simulate before you automate: This is where it gets really clever. Before you turn anything on for your customers, eesel AI’s simulation mode tests its AI setup on thousands of your past tickets. It shows you exactly how it would have performed, giving you a clear forecast of its accuracy. It takes all the guesswork out of the process and gives you total confidence before you go live, something you just can't do with Zendesk's native tools.

A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation mode, which helps users test how the AI will classify spam vs genuine inquiries before full implementation, a better approach than using Zendesk AI to classify spam vs genuine inquiries for agents alone.

• It connects all your knowledge: eesel AI can plug into all your knowledge sources, from your help center and internal documents to Slack. This gives it a much richer understanding of what a "genuine inquiry" is for your business, which drastically cuts down the risk of false positives.

Stop managing spam and start automating it

You can absolutely use Zendesk's native AI to piece together a semi-manual system for flagging spam. But it's a reactive approach that needs constant attention and always carries the risk of burying real customer issues in the junk folder. It's a temporary patch, not a long-term solution.

Modern support teams deserve tools that work on their own, are simple to set up, and are reliable. Your agents' time is just too valuable to be wasted on digital housekeeping.

If you're serious about getting spam out of your queue and letting your team focus on customers, it might be time to move past building manual rules. See how eesel AI can automate your ticket triage and spam classification with a free trial or a quick demo.