The backlog blues: symptoms and remedies
The main problems arising from email’s prominent role in support?
Communicating asynchronously and manually triaging tickets wastes time, creates huge backlogs, and distracts agents from processing complex tasks.
Maeve Condell, our Customer Success Lead, outlined the main symptoms of the backlog blues – and how ticket automation alleviates them – in a conversation with our CMO, Will McInnes:
“One of our customers recently saved up to three minutes per ticket just because they were able to automatically update fields in their tickets,” explained Maeve, who also pointed to automated routing and labeling as ways to get emails to the right reps, and to the power of AI in understanding, classifying, and answering requests.
We at Ultimate have been helping our customers beat the backlog blues with AI for roughly a year. And it looks like we’re on the right track: Since our first launch, we’ve:
- Processed 2 million tickets
- Seen a 42% answer rate
- Enriched over 80% of tickets
Tomorrow’s success story with our Freshdesk integration: efficiency and consistent CSAT
And after success stories with ticket automation in Zendesk, we’ve now started seeing promising results with our Freshworks Beta customers:
“Customer support can be repetitive, tedious, and boring. With automation, my key goal was to make the jobs of my team as interesting and as varied as possible,” said Ron Gerber, Head of Customer Support at Tomorrow, a sustainable Fintech company we’re working with.
When asked what he would advise others looking to get started with automation, Ron suggested a proactive-data backed approach:
“We just threw ourselves into it, started labeling our data, started seeing important intents and common labels emerge, and then we built our concept based on that real-life data, rather than the other way around,” remembers Ron.
Another thing he’s learned?
“Don’t be shy about introducing your customers to automated replies. They will appreciate the fact that someone is taking care of their request immediately.”
- Ron Gerber, Head of Customer Support at Tomorrow
Ron’s enthusiasm is backed up by Tomorrow’s first tentative results with automation: Out of the roughly 300 emails Tomorrow handled last week, two thirds of the tailored replies sent by their virtual agent did not lead to a further reply from the customer. Most importantly, automation has kept CSAT scores up.
Ron is among the first of our customers selected to test our newest email ticketing solution for Freshdesk, which makes it easier to increase agent productivity, drive better customer experiences, and scale across languages, geographies, and timezones.
“From today on, every single one of our customers can use our native integration with Freshdesk,” announced our Product Manager Mai Belbesy. “Wherever your customers are, wherever you operate, we’ve got your back.”
Product updates: What’s new about our ticket automation solution for Freshdesk
“Let’s assume you get an incoming ticket from a VIP customer. Ultimate recognizes the customer’s intent and tier and can then perform actions — like routing, filling, tagging, and ticket closing — and send replies to the customer.”
- Mai Belbesy, Product Manager at Ultimate
Watch on demand for a walkthrough of the product by our Lead Solution Architect James Longbotham.
We also introduced additional analytic capabilities, making it easier than ever to see which tickets were answered & understood, filter tickets by language, resolution, label, and intent, see customers’ top intents, and spot areas of improvement with visualizations in our dashboard.
Future gazing: What's next for email and ticket automation?
Finally, CX expert and Senior Freshworks Director Colin Crowley provided future gazing on email as a support channel, stressing how AI technology would continue to reinforce – and optimize – its position as the foundation of modern customer support.
“With the rise of AI technology, quality and efficiency can go hand in hand.”
- Colin Crowley, Senior Director of Customer Success, Freshworks