A keyword category is a named list of words to watch for — Complaint, Cancellation, Price question. When a customer uses one of those words, the conversation is tagged with that category, and a high-priority category can notify you straight away.
This is how you stop an angry customer sitting unnoticed in a list of hundreds.
Before you start
- Categories work on conversations your agents have already handled, so it helps to have some in Conversation Histories first.
- Your role needs the
create keyword-categoriespermission to add or edit categories.
Steps
- 1
Start from the suggested categories
Click Load suggested categories. It fills in a sensible starting set for you to edit, which is faster than inventing categories from scratch.
Load the suggestions, then delete what does not apply to your business and rename the rest. Ten minutes of editing beats an hour of guessing.
The Keyword Categories page with the load button - 2
Create your own
Click Create Category and fill in the form:
Field What it does Category name What you will see in reports, e.g. Complaint Color The colour of its tag in lists Priority High or Normal — only High can notify Notify Send a notification when a high-priority category matches Keywords The words to watch for The create category form - 3
Add the keywords
Type a keyword and press Enter to add it. Repeat for each one. Add the words your customers really type, including misspellings and the informal version — match is on the words in the list, not on their meaning.
A category with no keywords never matches anything. If a category looks inactive, check its keyword list first.
- 4
Turn on notifications for what matters
Set Priority to High and enable Notify on the few categories you really want to be interrupted for.
Marking everything High makes the notifications worthless. Pick the two or three categories that genuinely need a human the same day.
- 5
Read the results
Categories show up as tags on conversations in Conversation Histories, and the most frequent ones appear under Top Topics on the Dashboard.
Category tags on a conversation
Good to know
- Keywords are matched as words, so short generic ones like no will match almost everything. Prefer specific phrases.
- A conversation can land in several categories at once — that is expected.
- Editing a category changes how new conversations are tagged; it does not retag old ones.