AP Helpdesk Intents and Outcomes

Who this is for. Super Admins maintaining an agent still on Collaborative Mode. See the Roles and Access.

Intents & Outcomes is a capability group on the AP Helpdesk tab under Collaborative Mode. The product describes it as “Action rules per email category and intents”, and instructs you to choose, for each email category (intent), the actions the agent should take: select the actions that apply for each category, whether labels, notes, or tasks, and configure any additional options.

Table 1. Intents

Each intent names both the sender type and what they asked for, so the same request from a vendor and from a colleague are separate rows with separate settings.

Navigate to Intents and Outcomes

The Intents & Outcomes section appears when the autonomy level is Collaborative Mode.

1. On the Define capabilities step, select the AP Helpdesk tab.

2. In the left navigation, select Intents & Outcomes.

Figure 1. Intents & Outcomes: the intent list and the actions available for the selected intent.

Actions

You set these per email category; the Effect column states what each makes the agent do.

Table 2. Actions available per intent

Send Reply and Autonomous Reply are not the same decision. The first prepares a draft for an analyst; the second sends it to the vendor unreviewed. Set them per intent rather than uniformly.

How the intent list is organized

The left column lists each sender-and-intent combination, for example: Internal Sender has requested PO Status, Vendor has requested payment status, or Vendor is inquiring about a short payment.

Combinations are sender-aware: the same business intent appears separately for Internal Senders and for Vendors, and each can be configured with different actions. A colleague asking for PO status and a vendor asking for payment status warrant different task behavior, and the split allows each to be set independently.

Decide what each intent should do

• Add Tasks for intents that need a person: approvals, disputes, anything with fraud exposure.

• Add Labels and Add Notes without tasks for informational intents your team wants traceable but not actioned: payment confirmations, acknowledgements.

• Nothing selected means the intent is detected and recorded but produces no outcome. Reasonable for noise categories such as out-of-office notifications.

An intent with no actions selected is the Collaborative Mode equivalent of automation you have chosen not to have.

Interaction with Agent Replies

This section controls whether the Agent Co-worker replies to an intent and whether that reply goes out without review. The wording of each reply is configured separately, per template, in Agent Replies. For more information, see AP Helpdesk Agent Replies.

Labels, notes and tasks for an intent

Three of the actions available per intent in Intents & Outcomes record something against the message or the queue rather than replying: Add Labels, Add Notes, and Add Tasks.

Configure the actions

1. On the Define capabilities step, select the AP Helpdesk tab, then select Intents & Outcomes.

2. Select an intent from the list.

3. Select any combination of Add Labels, Add Notes, and Add Tasks.

4. Repeat per intent, then select Next.

Figure 2. Add Labels, Add Notes and Add Tasks for the selected intent.

What each action does

The audience differs more than the mechanism. A note reaches people who never open the Helpdesk Mailbox, while a task reaches its assignee and anyone watching the queue.

Table 3. Intent actions

Combine labels, notes and tasks

• All three for intents needing action and a paper trail: disputes, banking detail requests.

• Labels and notes without tasks for informational traffic worth tracing but not actioning: payment confirmations.

• Labels alone for lightweight visibility with no record-keeping: general acknowledgements.

• None for noise. The intent is still detected and recorded; it just produces nothing.

Notes reach further than the other two: a note lands on the record itself, so a colleague looking at an invoice six months later sees the vendor correspondence context without opening a mailbox.

These checkboxes decide whether the actions happen per intent. Task creation can additionally be gated by sender type in Processing & Automation, and both must allow it for a task to be created. For more information, see AP Helpdesk Processing and Automation in Collaborative Mode.

Default task priority for an intent

Default Task Priority sets the priority a task starts at when it is raised for a given intent. It sits with the other actions for that intent in Intents & Outcomes.

Set the priority

The priorities are the same three used throughout the queue: High, Medium and Low. A task the agent raises without an explicit priority starts at Medium. Priority is a triage signal for the person working the queue; it does not change the Task SLA thresholds.

1. Select an intent, and confirm Add Tasks is selected. The Default Task Priority list appears only when it is.

2. Select High, Medium, or Low.

3. Repeat for each intent that creates tasks, then select Next.

Figure 3. Default Task Priority, shown when Add Tasks is enabled.

Choose a level

Table 4. Priority guidance by intent character

A queue where every intent is set to High has no priority signal at all.

Priority is not urgency-over-time

Priority says how important an intent’s tasks are; the Task SLA thresholds say how long a task has been waiting. The two are independent. A Low priority task can be Overdue, and a High priority task can be comfortably within target.

This sets the default. Analysts can change the priority on an individual task afterwards, but only on tasks that are unassigned or assigned to them, and only if their role carries the task Update permission.

Related information

• AP Helpdesk Agent Replies

• AP Helpdesk Processing and Automation in Collaborative Mode

• Collaborative Mode Overview