AI Agents · Lesson

Ticket Routing and Escalation Logic

Classifying intent, routing to specialist agents, and escalation triggers.

The Routing Problem

A customer service agent receives thousands of diverse messages daily: billing disputes, password resets, product defects, shipping delays, feature requests. Sending every message to the same handler produces slow, low-quality responses.

Ticket routing classifies each message and sends it to the team best equipped to resolve it.

Intent Classification with an LLM

The routing layer calls an LLM with a classification prompt. The model returns a structured response with an intent label and a confidence score.

import openai, json

client = openai.OpenAI(api_key='YOUR_OPENAI_KEY')

INTENTS = ['billing', 'technical_support', 'returns_refunds',
           'account_access', 'shipping', 'general_inquiry']

def classify_intent(message: str) -> dict:
    prompt = (
        f'Classify this customer message into exactly one intent.\n'
        f'Intents: {INTENTS}\n'
        f'Message: "{message}"\n'
        f'Respond with JSON: {{"intent": "...", "confidence": 0.0-1.0}}'
    )
    resp = client.chat.completions.create(
        model='gpt-4o-mini',
        messages=[{'role': 'user', 'content': prompt}],
        response_format={'type': 'json_object'}
    )
    return json.loads(resp.choices[0].message.content)

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