What is intent classification?
Intent classification is the AI task of labeling a customer message with the underlying goal, separately from the surface text. “I want my money back”, “refund me”, and “I cannot believe you charged me” all map to the same intent: refund request.
Why classify
Intent labels drive three downstream actions: routing (send refunds to billing department, send technical questions to tier 2), self-service deflection (show the refund article instead of opening a chat), and analytics (count how many billing questions came in this week).
Approaches
Approaches include rules, embedding-based similarity and language-model classification. Each has different cost, speed and accuracy tradeoffs. Evaluate the method on your own customer requests, including ambiguous messages.
Output
A classifier may return a label and a confidence score. Define what happens when the label is uncertain or no permitted action matches. Classification should help route a request; it should not grant permission to perform a sensitive action.
See it working on message.com.
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