Intents and sentiments explainedUpdated 12 minutes ago

An intent describes what a customer is asking for in a conversation, such as a refund, an order status update, or a wholesale inquiry. A sentiment describes how the customer feels: positive, negative, or neutral. Gorgias detects both automatically, so you can route, prioritize, and power automations based on what customers need and how they feel.

Intents and sentiments are building blocks for automation across Gorgias. Rules use them to tag and route tickets, AI Agent uses intents to choose which skill to follow, and reports use them to show why customers contact you.

This article explains how intents and sentiments work, where you can use them, and what each intent covers. It covers:

• Understand intents
  • How intents are organized
  • How Gorgias detects an intent
• Understand sentiments
• See where intents and sentiments are used
• Browse all intents
• Frequently asked questions

Understand intents

An intent is the main topic of a customer conversation. Gorgias gives each ticket one intent at a time, so you can group tickets by why customers wrote in.

How intents are organized

Every intent has two levels: a category and a subcategory. The category is the subject, such as Order or Return. The subcategory is the specific reason within that subject, such as Refund or Status. Together they make one intent, written as Order::Refund.

Gorgias defines the intents. You can't create, rename, or remove them.

How Gorgias detects an intent

Gorgias analyzes the conversation each time your customer sends a message, then picks the intent that best matches what the conversation is about. Because it looks at the whole conversation, the intent can change as the conversation goes on. For example, a ticket that starts as Order::Status becomes Return::Request if the customer later asks to send the item back.

Keep in mind:

• Gorgias analyzes messages from your customer only. Messages from your team and internal notes don't get an intent.
• A ticket has no intent when Gorgias can't detect one.
• Gorgias also checks whether a message needs a reply. It labels messages that don't need one Other::No Reply, and it labels spam Other::Spam.

Understand sentiments

A sentiment describes how a customer feels in a message. Gorgias detects one sentiment for each message, and you can't change it. Sentiments are useful for deciding how to approach a customer, or for reading customer satisfaction trends over time. Sentiments aren't shown on tickets, but you can use them in rules and reports.

See where intents and sentiments are used

Rules, views, reports, and AI Agent all use intents.

• Rules. Create rules that use an intent or sentiment as a condition to tag, route, prioritize, or reply to tickets automatically.
• Views. Create a view that filters by the AI Intent ticket field to see tickets with a specific intent in one place. Gorgias stores each ticket's intent in this field.
• AI Agent skills. Each AI Agent skill is linked to one or more intents. When AI Agent detects a matching intent, it follows that skill's instructions.
• AI coverage. Open AI coverage to see how many tickets AI Agent handled for each intent, and to choose which intents it handles.
• Reports. The Ticket attributes report shows how many tickets each intent has and how that volume changes over time.

Tag tickets automatically with a rule template

The Identify intents and sentiments rule template tags tickets with RETURN/EXCHANGE, ORDER-CHANGE/CANCEL, ORDER-STATUS, PRODUCT, and PROMOTION based on a ticket's intent, and with feedback, positive, and negative based on its sentiment. You can create a rule using this template, and edit it to customize the rule for your inbox.

Browse all intents

Gorgias detects the intents listed below. Select a category to see its intents and what each one covers.

Frequently asked questions