What is ticket routing?
In the customer support world, ticket routing is the process of assigning a ticket (a new customer query) to the department, and even the agent, best suited to handle it. Traditionally, this process is manual: help desk agents centralize the incoming tickets across all channels, tag them according to several criteria (topic, channel, language, customer revenue, sentiment, urgency, etc.) and route them to the appropriate person or team. The aim is to ensure that every query finds their way to the right support agent right away. And automated ticket routing is making that easier.
Why is ticket routing important?
Ticket routing happens exclusively behind the scenes, yet it’s an incredibly important part of driving customer satisfaction. A support ticket arriving at the right agent in the shortest amount of time impacts metrics like first response time (FRT), first contact resolution rate (FCRR), and resolution rate in general. On the contrary, a misrouted ticket may take a customer from agent to agent in an endless quest for the right person or department, which is a sure-fire way of decreasing their satisfaction.
How AI is changing the ticket routing game
The thing is, relying on manual routing has its drawbacks: for the agents, it is a repetitive and mundane task; they can make sorting mistakes that will have repercussions down the line; it’s also a time-consuming process that is hard to scale. But as it happens, ticket routing is a very good candidate for AI-powered automation.
Using machine learning algorithms allows the support desk to automatically tag and categorize incoming tickets, making sure they are attributed to the right person in a record amount of time, around the clock.
Automated ticket routing can help increase rapidity, efficiency and, subsequently, customer satisfaction. It is, by definition, highly scalable. And it frees up time for agents to engage in more interesting and valuable activities.
Learn more about AI-powered ticket automation
Go beyond ticket routing
What’s more, AI-powered ticket automation has further uses. If your ticket automation solution integrates into your CRM, like Zendesk or Freshworks, it will have access to your historical support data. This means you can train it to respond to your customer inquiries just like a human agent would. In addition to routing tickets, it can tag and even respond to tickets, often resolving simple requests. This relieves your agents’ workload even further and drives efficient and exceptional customer experiences.
Plus, support automation is a rapidly developing field, and its utility is not limited to your backend systems. Today, you can implement a generative AI-powered chatbot to begin automating your customer conversations within minutes. But your automation journey doesn't have to stop there. You can then combine this sexy new tech with more manual conversation design so you can also customize responses to fit with those more complex queries. Taken together, this hybrid approach to automation will help you steadily build up your automation rate by enabling you to get started quickly without sacrificing control where you need it.
And of course, once you've got your bot answering FAQs, you can add incorporate ticket automation to really make the most out of what support automation has to offer. Taken together, it's a surefire way to make both your agents' and your customers' lives easier.