Triage Tickets with Advanced AI Automation

Ticket triaging is the act of evaluating and directing support tickets to the right person based on order of importance, topic, or urgency, and doing so in a manner that is quick and efficient. 

Automating ticket triage means implementing a tool that sends that ticket to the correct person the first time, automatically. Customer support AI is now capable of using historical knowledge, sentiment, and intent, to automatically predict characteristics, properly prioritize, and route to the right person or team.

There are two things that are vital to customer support teams: staying organized and being productive. Triaging tickets is crucial to customer support teams staying organized and on top of customer needs. Triaging tickets is arguably the most important step in the customer support process since it gets a ticket to the right person who can provide the best information. 

When a customer send in a customer support query they want their information presented to them as quickly as possible. By automating the ticket triaging process, you help meet customer needs and company SLAs in a much more efficient manner. 

A lack of efficiency in meeting customer support needs only leads to customer and agent frustration. Agents are handling data every single day; they’re bombarded with information from customers and from the organization they work in constantly. And it’s not like it’s information that’s siloed in one place, no. Agents are managing swarths of inquiries form multiple channels including socials, text, and live chat. 

Automating ticket triage benefits both agents and customers because the process is easier for agents to manage and it’s much quicker and helpful for customers using it.

Triaging in customer support is the act of evaluating and directing support tickets to the correct individual to get a response. Many companies do this process manually, having a dedicated agent triaging tickets based on topic, urgency, and importance. Many businesses choose to automate this process with AI for customer support designed to understand the intent and sentiment behind an incoming customer support ticket and send it to the right team or person for a response.

Step 1: Create Categorization

The first step is setting up a ticket triage process to create a categorization system. The most common system teams will use is one where tickets are handled, categorized, and routed based on the following factors: 

Urgency

Customer support teams hope to address the most severe customer complaints as soon as they see them. Prioritizing more pressing issues over less important ones can help address urgent customer needs as they come on. When prioritizing based on urgency, support teams need to be well-versed and informed on what is deemed as “urgent.” Urgent support requests are often from top priority customers or the sentiment from them is determined to be urgent. You’ll want to ensure everyone is on the same page. 

Importance

Deciding how important a message is can be a little arbitrary. If your support org wishes to resolve customer support needs based on importance, you’ll need to clearly define what is important. Most of the time this is based on customer importance and the impact of ticket resolution. Incoming support requests from executives or bigger companies will usually feel more important than those coming from common customers, so you’ll need to prioritize as needed. 

Channel

If you’re like most support orgs, you’re probably battling a barrage of incoming support requests from multiple channels, including chat, email, social, text, and maybe even phone. It can be difficult to know which queries to prioritize. 

Many support teams will prioritize providing customer support to one channel over another, it’s up to your organization to determine which ones to resolve first. 

Product

Companies often offer many products to their customers, some support organizations choose to create categorization for incoming customer support needs by siloing tickets by product. Your org may want to tag tickets by product name. 

Service Level Agreements

Another way many support teams set up their categorization is with SLAs. Service Level Agreements look at terms between customers and support. These service level agreements will denote ticket priority and are often meant for high-priority customers who pay for such SLAs. 

Step 2: Define When To Triage

Like we mentioned, support teams need to outline what drives severity and urgency to require a proper triaging. What are the characteristics of the different severity levels for triaging tickets within your organization? Here is where teams must decide what is considered a high-priority ticket. 

In order to determine what is considered a high-priority ticket, support teams must set specific parameters. Your team must now define each level of urgency and assess the impact it will have on your business.

Most businesses will prioritize tickets and support issues that result in “extreme loss of revenue,” what that means for your organization will depend on the type of product or service you are delivering. For example, Slack does its best to keep users up-to-date with any outages. During their last outage they determined that the loss and impact on customers was too great and was very much “high priority.” They fixed the issue and solved it as fast as possible. This is because they likely had “global outage” as a very urgent issue to fix. 

Step 3: Assign Agents 

Along with having a solid plan in place for triaging your tickets, you must also ensure that your agents are fully prepared to support any needs within support. Your team is a crucial element to the ticket triaging process. 

Your support organization will need to determine how they will assign agents within their triage process in order to best meet customer needs. 

What we’ve seen many support teams do is break their team needs based on their categorization model. If tickets are being sent in and siloed into categories based on urgency, product or service, channel, or SLAs, then you’ll have agents who are specifically trained to reply to a certain type of message. 

Other companies will also rotate agents – someone may be watching queue volumes one day and replying to social media support questions the next, they could be in live chat responses in the morning and working on different tickets in the afternoons. 

Assigning agents to specific question types or categories is a beneficial way to respond to tickets. It allows for certain matters to reach the specific person who can help right away, and keeps urgent tickets from getting lost in the queue. 

Your agents deserve to feel valued and appreciated while working, help them feel empowered by improving how they do their jobs.

Customer support teams function on what is called a service desk, or a help desk — examples include Zendesk, Salesforce, Service Now, etc. A customer service desk is a tool or software that helps customer service teams manage incoming service requests. This is where support agents can view customer queries and reply to them. 

Effective service desk triage is set up in a way that triaged tickets and the process of triaging happens within the service desk. When tickets are being sent to the right individual, right in the helpdesk, support agents are able to better assist customers and do so in a much more efficient manner. 

A successfully set up help desk seeks to solve incidents quickly, find resolutions to persistent problems, and keep end-users happy. Agents help make the process smoother.