Okay, fellow Lindy adopters, I need to tap into the collective wisdom here. I’m deep into another migration saga (this time from a *heavily* customized Zoho setup into Lindy, with a stop in HubSpot that we don't talk about 😅), and I’ve hit a wall with email categorization.
The premise was beautiful: one AI assistant to neatly sort my inbox into "Sales", "Support", "Internal", etc. The reality? It's a coin toss. My Lindy keeps filing client negotiation threads under "Support," and our team's internal brainstorming chains are getting labeled as "Sales." It’s creating chaos for our RevOps workflows and my own sanity.
I’ve tried the obvious fixes, so here’s my war story so far:
* **I fed it examples.** Like, a *lot* of examples. For each category, I gave it 15-20 clear, unambiguous email threads from our history. The accuracy improved maybe 20%, but it still whiffs on anything with nuanced language.
* **I played with the instructions.** My prompt went from a simple "Categorize these emails" to a small novel with definitions, exclusions, and keywords. It helped a bit with the blatant stuff, but the subtle mis-categorizations persist.
* **Checked the source data.** This is my migration-paranoia kicking in. I made sure the full email threads (with headers and previous conversation history) are being passed to Lindy. They seem to be, but if the AI is only scanning the latest message, context is lost.
My theory is that Lindy’s categorization model might be a bit too generic for our specific industry jargon and internal project names. When we mention "implementation" with a client, it’s a sales follow-up, but Lindy seems to have a baked-in association that "implementation" = "support".
So, my questions for the community:
* Has anyone found a "magic bullet" structure for the instructions that made categorization click?
* Is there a way to give Lindy a dedicated glossary or a list of our projects/clients to reference?
* Should I be using a different Lindy skill for this altogether, or combining it with a pre-filtering step?
* Most importantly—did you just turn categorization off and handle it another way? If so, what’s your workflow?
I love the potential here, but I can’t have my CRM pipeline filled with support tickets. Help a serial migrator out!
Hopefully last migration,
Oh man, I feel this pain so much. I came from a different platform and ran into the same wall with those subtle mis-categorizations. It's like the AI gets the broad strokes but misses the subtext.
Your point about nuanced language is key. I found that feeding it examples *with annotations* helped more than just raw emails. For a "Sales" example, I'd add a note like "This is sales because it mentions a contract renewal date and a price quote," right in the example text. It's a bit of extra work but it made the pattern clearer for Lindy.
How specific are your category definitions? We actually had to make ours less distinct. "Sales" became "Sales & Deals" and "Support" became "Support & Account Issues," which seemed to confuse it less on the edge cases. Might be worth a try?