Triage signals: language, intent, entities, risk and guidance

These fields and tools help agents see what a conversation needs. In Cliedesk Free, agents, rules and keyword lists set them. AI detection is available with Cliedesk Pro. See Topics and keyword triage for topics and keyword lists.

Language

A new conversation gets its language from the first of these that is known: the contact’s preferred language, the WordPress user’s locale, the language of the page where the chat started (multilingual plugins such as WPML and Polylang set it), the browser language. To change it, use Language in the conversation header. Rules can set it too. The change shows in the history.

Intent, urgency and effort

• Intent can hold several values. You can edit the options and add your own intents. If one message asks for two things, an agent can split it into two conversations (see Conversations).
• Urgency set by an agent or rule counts in the conversation’s computed priority and shows in its explanation.
• Effort has the values XS, S, M and L. Reports and backlog forecasts count them as 1, 2, 3 and 5 points.

Entities

Entities find values in the subject and in customer messages and write them into a field. Open Settings → Custom fields → Entities and select Add entity:

1. Enter a Name and choose the field to fill (Fill field).
2. Under Find by, choose Pattern (a regular expression such as #(\d{4,8})) or List (values separated by commas; Allow typos is optional).
3. Choose when to look: First message only, Every message or Never overwrite.

With WooCommerce, a found number that is a real order links that order to the conversation. A number that is no order links nothing.

Risk

The Risk field has these signals: chargeback, legal, churn, safety or self-harm, abusive, vulnerable and public complaint. Agents, rules and keyword lists set it. Each new signal notifies the supervisors who work on the product, in the app and by email (per their notification settings). To notify other people instead, set triage.risk_recipients (see Settings reference).

No reply needed

A message marked as needing no reply does not reopen the conversation, does not start an SLA timer and sets Reply needed to no. The next real customer message reopens the conversation as usual. Recognizing out-of-office replies, auto-replies, read receipts and newsletters that arrive by email is available with Cliedesk Pro.

Guidance notes

A guidance note reminds agents what to do with some conversations. Open Settings → Custom fields → Guidance notes, select Add guidance, then enter a Name, conditions, a Note and an optional Link (optional) to a policy or saved reply. A matching conversation gets the note once, as an internal note by “Guidance”, when it arrives or when its fields change.

Incidents

For an outage, open Settings → Notices → Add notice, choose the Incident kind and keep Open a tracker conversation on. You can choose where the notice shows (Show in), add conditions so that New conversations that match join the tracker, and add a Saved reply for agents. Resolving the tracker ends the notice and lets you send one update to each linked customer.

Owners and Cliedesk Admins (Manage settings) can change the custom field settings. Notices need Manage the help center.