Intent Classification

A practical example

Example: replies to an outbound campaign are classified in real time; 'send me the security docs' routes to the technical queue, 'not now, revisit in Q3' triggers a dated follow-up task, and unsubscribe requests are handled immediately.

What to evaluate before investing

• Ask how intent categories are defined — fixed by the vendor, configurable by you, or learned from your historical messages.
• Test classification on your real reply samples, including ambiguous ones like 'maybe next quarter', and check the assigned intent.
• Ask what happens to messages classified with low confidence — do they default to a human queue or a catch-all intent?

Limitations and tradeoffs

Tradeoff: classification accuracy depends heavily on your category definitions and training data, and misclassification silently misroutes conversations. New intent types emerge over time and require periodic review of the category set.