How do I add and manage custom reasons for contact and intent?

Summary

This guide provides an overview of how to manage and interpret Reasons for Contact (RFC) and Intent within your platform. You’ll learn how to:

• Set appropriate user permissions
• Navigate the RFC & Intent management interface
• Create and categorise new RFC or intent
• Review and act on suggested insights
• Access and filter conversational data to uncover trends

By leveraging this functionality, your team can better understand customer needs and optimise engagement strategies based on real conversation data.

Managing permissions

To view and manage RFC and intent users must have the appropriate permissions enabled. For a given role you can set these permissions under the 'Access to reports' category. 

Navigation prompt

Under User Management > Select Roles & Permissions > edit a role

Under Access to Reports you'll find the following permissions:

• View reasons for contact: Allows read-only access to RFC and intent
• Manage reasons for contact: Grants full management access to RFC and intent

RFC & Intent management screen overview

Navigation prompt

Navigate to Analytics > RFC & intent to view the RFC and intent management screen

The management screen provides an overview of RFC and intent statuses and their associated parent, child hierarchy. 

• Search: Use the search bar to find a specific RFC or intent
• Filters: Filter RFC and intent by status (Active, Suggested and/or Archived) 
• Name: Title of the RFC or intent
• Subcategories: The number of Level 2 (child) records set up
• Instances: Number of contacts linked to the record
• Last applied: Date the record last appeared in a conversation
• Status: Current state: Active, Suggested, or Archived
• Actions: Available options for managing the record
  • Accept or reject suggestions
  • Deactivate reason for contact/intent records
  • Reactivate reason for contact/intent records

Active

Active RFC and intent are live records that will be attached to conversations when analysed. You can deactivate these when no longer applicable.

Suggestions

Suggested RFC and intent are automatically identified through conversation analysis. These suggestions appear when new patterns are detected that may not yet be defined in your existing taxonomy.

Archived

Rejected suggestions and deactivated RFC and intent records will be archived and can be reviewed under this status. You can make re-activate these via the actions menu. 

Creating new reasons for contact & intent 

To manually create new RFC and intent, click the +Create New button.

Simply add the RFC or intent name and click create. For each record you can set the category hierarchy > either Parent (Level 1) or Child (Level 2). If a child then tick the 'belongs to a parent' option and choose the parent category from the dropdown. 

You can 'save and close' to continue or 'save and add another' to continue adding additional records. This will automatically create as activated.

Managing suggested reasons for contact and intent

You can accept of reject suggested RFC and intent from the actions column.

1. Select the Suggestions filter.
2. Review suggested records, including Level 1 and 2 types.
3. Use the green ✓ to accept and activate a suggestion.
4. Use the red ✕ to reject it. It will be archived, but can be restored later.

When accepting a suggestion, any fetched contacts where this has been found can be retroactively added, or you can maintain original records and choose not to apply to the instances. 

Viewing reasons for contact and intent

Conversations tab

Analysed fetched contacts will be tagged with a RFC and intent. These can be viewed from the conversations tab in the imported contacts page, a column for Level 1 and 2. 

Where a reason or intent has not been attached to a conversation a dash symbol `-` will be displayed. This is due to a match not found with the existing RFC and intent taxonomy and a suggestion may have been put forward or the conversation not being analysed (check out our analytics guardrails). 

Discovery tab

You can access conversational intelligence insights on RFC and intent from the imported contacts discovery tab. 

RFC will be displayed in the charting summary across all filtering within the discovery table for an instant overview of why customers are getting in contact. To explore the information in more detail and uncover more trends you can use the group by filter to see related metrics for each RFC or intent.

Check out our discovery tab user guide for more information on how to navigate this page.

Conversation Filters

Across all conversations you can use the imported contact filters to segment conversations based on RFC and intent. Use the left hand panel to apply your RFC and intent criteria. These can be found under the evaluagent Insight Fields section.

Fetched Contact Insights

RFC and intent will be available in the insights column when viewing a fetched contact. Here you can view what instance has been found on the analysed contact, understand the reasoning for this result and view the evidence within the conversation.