Intent detection
Intent detection is working out what a customer wants from the words they used, so the right workflow can run.
What it means in practice
A customer writes “hi is the 4412 one coming today or what”. Behind that sentence is an order-status request with an order number in it. Intent detection turns the sentence into “check order 4412 and report the status”, which software can act on.
Older chatbots did this by matching messages against a list of intents you defined, each fed with sample sentences. Setting up fifty intents with twenty samples each was most of the work of a chatbot project. Anything a customer said that wasn’t close to a sample fell through to a fallback message.
What changed
Language models handle paraphrase, typos and indirect requests without samples. They also handle mixed languages. In many markets, real messages mix two languages in one sentence, and older classifiers broke on exactly that. AeroChat replies in the customer’s language, including messages that mix languages, and transcribes WhatsApp voice notes before reading them.
Self-service still often fails at this step. In a Gartner survey of 5,728 customers in December 2023:
- Only 14% of customer service issues were fully resolved in self-service.
- Even for issues customers called very simple, only 36% were.
- 45% of customers who started in self-service said the company didn’t understand what they were trying to do.
Source: Gartner press release, 19 August 2024, as reported by CRM Magazine.
After the intent is understood
Each of these messages can be understood correctly and still go nowhere without a connection to a real system.
| Message | Intent | What it needs |
|---|---|---|
| “is 4412 coming today” | Order status | Read the live order |
| “can I move Friday to Monday” | Reschedule | Change the calendar |
| “got the blue one or not” | Stock check | Read inventory |
| “how do I pay for the set lunch” | Purchase | Send a payment link |
When you evaluate a tool, ask what happens in the third column.
Two intents to handle on purpose
“I want a person.” Give it the highest priority. It should work the first time, in any phrasing. See live chat handover.
Several intents in one message. “Where is my order and can I change the address” is two requests. Answering the first and dropping the second produces another message from a more annoyed customer.
How to test it on your own messages
Take fifty real messages from last week without cleaning them up. Keep the typos, the voice notes, the mixed languages and the ones with no punctuation. Run them through the tool you are evaluating and count two things separately: did it understand, and could it finish. The fixes for each are different.
Related terms
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Test it with last week’s messages
Start your 7-day free trial. No credit card needed. Paste in your fifty messages, typos and all, and check which ones AeroChat understood and which ones it could finish.
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