Understanding AI Ticket Routing: Benefits and Challenges
In order to create a great customer experience, customer support teams need to be efficient. The more efficient they are, the quicker they can respond to requests. The quicker they respond to requests, the faster customers get a resolution. And the faster customers get a resolution to their issue, the happier they are (generally speaking).
For smaller support teams, it’s common for most agents to be generalists, meaning they can respond to basically any request that comes their way. However, as teams grow in size, it’s fairly common for people to start specializing in different areas. One group of agents might handle billing questions and another the more technical requests.
Once that specialization starts, there’s a new ticket management layer added where certain requests need to get routed to specific people and teams. In years past, teams have addressed this in a few ways. Sometimes a team member manually triages requests. In other cases they use intake forms that help sort conversations. Many support tools also offer workflow features that can route tickets to agents based on specific keywords in the message body or subject line or by another identifying feature like a team’s business hours or the sender’s email.
In the last couple of years, some help desks have added another option: AI ticket routing.
What is AI ticket routing?
AI ticket routing is a process where artificial intelligence sorts requests automatically based on factors like sentiment or topic. AI can be preferable to a solution like an automated workflow because it doesn’t solely rely on keywords. Instead, it uses natural language processing (NLP) to not only identify the topic of a customer message but also its intent. Through machine learning, the AI can also get better at spotting patterns in different request types and make fewer sorting errors over time.
What are the pros and cons of AI ticket routing?
Customer support is a tough job, plain and simple. It’s no wonder teams are intrigued by AI ticket routing, which can help make things a touch easier. However, while automated ticket routing certainly has the ability to make a positive difference, there are a couple of potential pitfalls. Here are some pros and cons to AI ticket routing.
Pros
Faster responses for customers
With AI ticket routing, teams can assign tickets to the right people in seconds. Because of that, agents get requests sooner and customers receive a response more quickly as well. For example, if a customer reaches out about a billing issue AI could recognize and route that request directly to your billing team. Or, if you’re using an intake form and a customer selects the wrong department, AI could potentially catch that and rectify the issue by sending it to the right spot. This also means you could get more granular over time with how you sort requests (ex. routing not only to the correct department but also to the person in that department most capable of resolving the issue), helping your team be even more efficient.
Less stress for human agents
Anyone who’s been on queue triage duty knows it can be a bit monotonous. By outsourcing request sorting to AI you save a human agent from doing the work. This means fewer rote tasks (which are generally the ones that wear people down most) and extra time to focus on more rewarding work. Instead of looking through each request individually, agents can simply monitor the queue, rerouting anything that happens to come to the wrong inbox. As AI sees these corrections, it gets a more sophisticated understanding of where each type of request should go, meaning routing mistakes will drop over time.
Cons
It can be expensive
Cutting-edge tech usually doesn’t come cheap, and AI ticket routing software is no different. Not all help desks offer AI-powered ticket routing, so the feature may require adding another tool (and subscription fee) to your support stack. For those that do, it’s generally relegated to the highest-cost plans. There are also the potential costs associated with training and setting up the feature and managing ongoing maintenance. In the long term, bigger teams may make the investment back in efficiency gains, but for smaller, lower-volume teams, it’s not as certain.
Complex cases can lead to sorting errors
AI is very impressive at understanding sentiment and recognizing patterns. That makes it very good at sorting basic requests (think things like password resets or refund requests). However, for things that are more nuanced or requests that involve more than one question, it struggles. This means that it could be more likely to put those tickets in the wrong place, potentially extending a customer’s wait time for a response.
Improving the customer experience is always top of mind for support teams, and for some, AI ticket routing could be a good way to do that. However, just as it is with any software purchase, you should take time to evaluate the options before jumping in feet first.
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Evaluating whether AI ticket routing is right for your team
Determining whether or not AI ticket routing is a worthwhile investment for your team comes down to a few things. So, before making any decisions, it’s helpful to answer the following questions.
What’s your ticket volume like?
AI ticket routing seems to make the most sense for those with high ticket volumes. In these cases, the benefit of organizing tickets very quickly outweighs concerns over cost or the occasional misrouted conversation.
How many products do you support?
If your team supports a number of different products or companies, AI ticket routing could also be a good option to help keep things separate. For example, if you’re a business process outsourcing (BPO) call center or something similar, ticket routing could be really beneficial.
What’s your team size?
Bigger teams with more specialties are usually good candidates for AI ticket routing. For smaller teams (probably any team under 10 or so agents), the benefit may not be as great.
Does your current help desk offer AI ticket routing?
Changing help desks is a big undertaking. If your current platform doesn’t offer AI ticket routing or provide a good third-party solution, it’s probably not worth it to switch to a new ticketing system specifically for AI routing alone.
What kind of technical support do you have access to?
Though AI ticket routing often comes as an out-of-the-box solution, it’s possible it will require some technical support to get up and running. If you don’t have access to a developer or IT support — or the budget to hire it — adding the feature may be more challenging.
How do you set up AI ticket routing?
The setup process for AI ticket routing largely depends on the tool you use and how complex the routing you’re doing is. However, if you plan on using a prebuilt solution, the process should be fairly simple.
In fact, in most cases, it really just comes down to turning the feature on or getting a software integration in place. Most help desks or third-party tools will have the ability to train their AI on your existing customer requests so it has a decent starting point.
From there, it will tag incoming messages by criteria like topic, urgency, or sentiment and route them according to the parameters you’ve set. The sorting may not be perfect from the beginning, but most tools provide you with the opportunity to give feedback that can help the functionality become more accurate over time.
What are some other AI applications for customer support?
Along with ticket routing, AI has a number of other potential uses for customer support. AI assist tools can help agents shorten, lengthen, or change the tone of a response. It can also help with things like spelling, grammar, or translating messages into different languages.
In some cases, you can even use AI to write an entire response. For example, with Help Scout’s AI drafts feature, AI reads the request and then drafts a response based on previous customer conversations and the content in your knowledge base. The agent can then review and edit the draft as needed, making responding to routine requests quick and easy.
Along with writing help, AI can summarize whole customer conversations to help agents get up to speed quickly on an issue. Having a summary gives agents context and generally reduces response times for customers.
AI can also assist agents by suggesting relevant help articles to share with customers based on the content of their request. There are also options for AI-powered bots and knowledge bases that can interact directly with customers and help answer basic questions.
Looking forward
AI-powered solutions offer the potential to streamline the ticket routing process, improving response times and reducing agent burnout. However, the decision to implement AI ticket routing should be carefully considered based on factors like ticket volume, team size, and available resources.
While it holds promise for larger, specialized support teams, smaller operations may find the investment less essential. Ultimately, the goal is to enhance customer satisfaction, and AI ticket routing is just one tool in the customer support tool kit. By carefully evaluating the pros and cons and understanding the specific needs of your team, you can determine if it’s the right fit for you.
Jesse Short
After spending a few years working as a support agent, Jesse made the switch to writing full-time. He is a Help Scout alum, where he worked to help improve the agent and customer experience.
