Full inboxes and a long queue of tickets are regular occurrences for support agents. Managing, or triaging tickets, manually can quickly become stressful – and it takes a good deal of time to get through it all.
Say you’re an agent. You finish one ticket (or 4,000), and more are sitting, just waiting for your attention. Some tickets are complicated and require more time, which leads to high-priority tickets not getting found, others being ignored, and others bouncing around between team members endlessly. And even on your best days, inconsistency in your answers can happen.
On top of this, manually routing tickets requires having deep knowledge of situational and historical precedence. Some systems want to tag tickets using customer input while others have tried to tag based on subject line content, but either only captures as much as what the subject line offers.
Thinking the life of a customer support agent is stressful? It doesn’t have to be! With the power of customer support AI, there is a solution to triage with more consistency, accuracy, efficiency, and clarity on ticket trends and needs. Keep reading to uncover some ways customer service AI, like Forethought Triage, helps customer support organizations.
#1 Automate the Mundane and Uncover Trends
Reading and routing tickets is mundane work. It’s not surprising to know this is a task agents struggle with. Whether you’re identifying spam, determining escalations, or moving tickets to the right agent’s lane, appropriately directing tickets can be time consuming and resource draining.
With customer support AI like Forethought Triage, you can intentionally automate all these processes through best-in-class machine learning that identifies the need and intent better than anything else, including a human agent.
Even better? With triage tools, you can build AI models to predict future tickets and solve customer questions faster. Instead of just going off past tags, your team can build these models based on past issues, tickets, and accurate categorization.
By gathering metrics on your tickets based on a comprehensive understanding like this, you’re learning about your business’s customer support trends while saving time. Why is this so important? You want to see common questions, issues, or concerns to prepare your team to answer tickets faster in the future. It also helps you make informed decisions about your customer and product.
#2 Find High-Priority Tickets
When your queue is full of support tickets, it can be difficult to determine which one to tackle first. Should you go with “first come, first serve,” or the ticket that’s full of expletives? Choosing the wrong one could lead to an unhappy customer or one who requires serious help having to wait.
Fortunately, customer support AI can help fix this problem. Automating customer support tasks can help categorize tickets, incoming and old, with a high accuracy, so you know for sure which one must be answered first. Forethought Triage specifically prioritizes tickets based on how simple a question is or whether or not a human agent is needed to resolve it.
Additionally, Forethought does this a little differently than other solutions. Rather than tagging based on the subject line or keywords in the ticket, our technology uses deep neural network learnings to provide the most accurate understanding of language. For example, not only can Forethought tag a ticket that’s laden with curse words, but it will also tag the ticket when it understands someone’s tone. If it’s evident they both need immediate assistance, Forethought will make sure both get the attention they need. That means you won’t miss any important ticket ever, colorful language or not.
Customer support AI can reduce the amount of time spent on doing the actual tagging.
#3 Route to the Right Team
A customer support team consists of several agents with different levels of experience, expertise, and knowledge. A fresh perspective is great, but routing requires a lot of historical knowledge about how an organization solves problems and an understanding of the vernacular that both internal and external folks use to express their issues.
Triage can help route a ticket that would normally take valuable time and energy for a new agent to route. It also helps veteran or talented agents from being bogged down with unnecessary work using a model that considers the different categories of different departments. Our customer support AI uses natural language understanding which also ensures that the correct person within a team is working on a ticket.
What does that mean for your team? Less stress!
They won’t be working on tickets they’re not cut out to handle or pinging each other to put more of your team’s energy into answering each issue collectively. Customer support AI also prevents these tickets from sitting around in an inbox too long or being passed around.
#4 Eliminate Spam
No one likes spam, and, unfortunately, customer support agents deal with a lot of it. Customer support AI automatically detects and removes unwanted tickets, ads, or unnecessary responses, whether malicious or not, and prevents them from ever entering your agents’ queue.
With Forethought, this can remove 20% of tickets in a queue with 98% accuracy, resulting in saved time and stress. You also won’t be working on tickets that don’t impact your teams’ customer satisfaction scores.
You’ll get back that lost time and improve operations because AI is continually learning, taking in new information, and optimizing your workflows.
The Bottom Line
Routing tickets is not an exciting part of making a great customer experience, but it’s foundational to an efficient customer support system. Instead of a manual process or a series of drop-down options and tags for customers to guess at, consider AI to help your team members focus on solving customer issues instead of moving them around your org.
Specific customer support AI tools like Forethought empower agents to make informed decisions to manage their day-to-day more effectively and efficiently — saving time while ultimately answering your tickets quicker and providing a great support experience.
