Intent Recognition
What is Intent Recognition?
Intent recognition is the use of AI to work out what a customer is trying to achieve from what they say or write, such as "track my order", "cancel my subscription" or "report a fault".
Intent recognition is the first step in most automated customer journeys: once the intent is known, the system can answer it, route the contact to the right team or pass the agent the right information. It is usually combined with entity extraction, which picks out details such as account numbers, dates and product names.
Beyond routing, intent data is one of the most valuable outputs of a contact center. Counting intents shows why customers are really getting in touch, and separating contacts the business wants (value demand) from those it caused by failing to do something right the first time (failure demand) points to the fixes that remove contacts altogether rather than just handling them faster.
Related: Contact reason (CR), Failure demand, Conversational AI.