5 ms·
Similar to the sibling comment, helpdesk ticket routing. The volume of helpdesk tickets large enterprises deal with is very easily and vastly underestimated. I
by tetha 3y ago
Similar to the sibling comment, helpdesk ticket routing.
The volume of helpdesk tickets large enterprises deal with is very easily and vastly underestimated. If you can even route 30% away from the central triage with 90+% accuracy and drop everything else back to the central triage... you suddenly safe 2 FTEs in that spot in some places. And increase customer satisfaction for most of those tickets because they get resolved faster.
Or, as much as people hate it, chatbots as a customer front. Yes, everyone here as an expert in a lot of tech has had terrible experiences with chatbots. Please mark your hate with the word "Lemon" in the comments. But decently implemented chatbots with a few systems behind them can resolve staggering amounts of simple problems from non-techies without human interaction from the company deploying them. It remains important to eventually escalate to humans - including the history from all of these interactions to avoid frustrations, sure.
Or, ticket/request preprocessing. Remember how spelling that 10 digit account number to a call center agent hard of hearing sucks? Those 4 retries because of you not using a better way to communicate that number also costs the company. Now, you can push a few of these retries into an AI system. If you mail them, an AI system can try to extract information like account numbers, intent, start of the problem, problem descriptions and such into dedicated fields to make the support agents faster.
Companies are certainly overdoing it at the moment, I'm not denying that. But a lot of the support/helpdesk pre-screening can be automated with current AI/ML capabilities very decently. Especially if you learn to recognize and navigate it.
- Karrot_Kream 3y agoThe last company I worked at eventually became a Big Tech. In the beginning though, we used to ask all engineers to pair with customer service folks to deal with ticket triage. When we got a bit bigger, we used to have rotations where eng would pair with customer service folks. Being on the other side of that was very eye-opening for all eng. Many used to come in with the same bias that you see on this site, that how dare you be routed to some automated service and how inhumane the service is. On the other side you see competent CS agents absolutely swamped with low-level questions that were often literally answered in docs and FAQ pages. I think getting transformer-based triage models correct can unlock tons of value.
- Sabinus 3y agoLemon
- AJRF 3y agoHard agree - i've heard frankly staggering "per support ticket" costs from every company i've worked for, or has publicly talked about customer support costs. Think $3-6 dollar per customer support ticket. A UK company, Octopus has been doing some interesting work on GenAI <> customer support, which is helped by their "Energy provider in a box" software called Kraken (https://octopusenergy.group/kraken-technologies https://octopusenergy.group/kraken-technologies), which gives a single unified view over their operations. They even have support agent level of personalisation - i.e; the agent will talk in the tone of voice of a given agent via fine-tuning of their chat history.
- allanwind 3y agoYou group tickets into root cause and the future projected cost will now fully fund fixing the issue. Most companies, however, look at customer support a cost center instead of valuable insight it is.
- allanwind 3y agoI taught customer service / software engineers to process tickets from the singular queue and eliminated routing. Worked surprisingly well. I have yet to see a chatbot in a customer service function that isn't strictly worse than a button. Usually, the button is "request refund / return" for whatever reason. It's like captcha stuff, web site owner is too dumb (no offense) to figure out how to handle spam so they offload that task onto the customer.
- greenie_beans 3y agoand this is why consumers lose a bunch of money, so corporations can save $3-6 per help desk ticket. then consumers get stuck in a bot interface and can never break out of it (speaking from personal experience)