Manual ticket resolution seems simple, but behind the scenes, it's often a chaotic jumble of incessant tasks piling up and often just waiting to go wrong. 

According to data, the average overall resolution rate across industries is approximately 76.2%.

In addition, the Service Quality Measurement (SQM) Group reports that 20% to 30% of tickets require more than one interaction to resolve.

Plus, as your business scales up, critical issues often escalate with traditional ticketing, and customer requests increase day by day. You could find your customer service teams scrambling to categorize, prioritize, and assign hundreds of queries while simultaneously tracking responses and updating ticket statuses.

Here, automated ticket resolution works wonders. It delegates the repetitive yet crucial components of ticket resolution to AI and empowers your human agents to do more.

In this article, we go over how automated ticket resolution functions, its benefits over traditional ticketing resolution, and how to get started with the most suitable tool. 

What is automated ticket resolution?

Automated ticket resolution means using AI-driven ticketing systems and workflow software to manage customer requests from when a ticket is created to when it is resolved—with minimal or no human intervention. 

Key components

1. AI and ML: These ticket resolution systems use AI&ML algorithms to analyze and process tickets.
2. NLP: It enables the system to understand the context and intent of customer messages, allowing for more accurate ticket handling.
3. Automated workflows: The system can perform various tasks automatically, including:some text
   • Creating tickets
   • Labeling and sorting
   • Routing to appropriate agents and departments
   • Escalating and handing over complex issues to human agents when necessary
   • Following up with customers

How does automated ticket resolution work?

Did you know that after implementing automated ticketing, medium enterprises saw response times decrease from 1 day to 2 hours and resolution times from 3 days to 1 day? 

Let’s take a closer look at the key functions of automated ticket resolution that make it happen: 

1.Data collection and integration

Ticket resolution starts with consolidating all your data sources—emails, SMS, social media, web forms, calls, and live chats—on a single dashboard. 

To accomplish this, use an omnichannel customer service platform such as Plivo CX. With its unified agent desktop feature, the tool eliminates data silos, brings all incoming customer requests to a single window pane, and allows human agents to have a broader context of customer issues across channels—that too without having to switch between channels.   

2.Data preprocessing

AI-powered ticketing programs clean, sort, label, and categorize the data you collated into sections for easier analysis. This step also includes removing duplicates, correcting input errors, and standardizing structure to improve the accuracy of the subsequent processes.

3.NLP

After preprocessing, the system uses its NLP capabilities to analyze, interpret, and understand each customer’s request, intent, and urgency. Moreover, predictive and sentiment analysis is employed to accurately identify context, enhance categorization, and yield problem-solving responses.

4.Fast ticket categorization

Using insights from the ML analysis and NLP, the automated ticketing system sorts each request into predefined categories such as technical issues, billing inquiries, product return and shipping, etc. This allows for quick routing of each request to the appropriate channel. 

Categorization also facilitates seamless rerouting when customer service escalation is essential. With Plivo CX, you get to create custom workflows and automations using a simple drag-and-drop interface without having to code.

5.24/7 response

For low-level to medium-level queries that barely require sophisticated expertise, the system routes them to integrated AI-powered chatbots. 

To help you provide 24/7 customer service and handle maximum queries during peak seasons, Plivo CX provides OpenAI-powered self-service chatbots. You can train the bot using your company’s custom dataset to ensure accuracy and relevancy. Once deployed, the chatbot can automatically handle routine customer inquiries, freeing up your agents.

Plus, the tool also ensures brand consistency by seamlessly training AI agents to align with your company's unique voice and policies.

6.Agent assistance

For high-level tickets that the AI self-service bots cannot resolve, the automated ticket resolution system redirects or escalates them to a human agent of relevant expertise.

For example, by intuitively prioritizing urgent tickets to the most suitable agents, Plivo CX dramatically reduces response times and enhances customer satisfaction. 

7.Learning and improvement

Since AI ticketing systems leverage ML, they relentlessly learn from previous patterns and customer interactions, improving ticket categorization and enhancing the quality of responses over time.

With Plivo CX, you can maintain agility and freshness through effortless updates to your AI agents, allowing you to seamlessly adapt to new product launches, promotions, or policy changes.

Benefits of automated ticket resolution

Here are the key reasons why you must implement an automated ticket resolution system if you are looking to scale or streamline your CX operations:

1.Improves efficiency

An average company receives over 17,630 tickets monthly, with a 76.2% resolution rate. It means that out of every 100 tickets, you can only sort two-thirds of them.

The remaining one-third of queries are mostly unresolved due to complexities, such as missing information, errors by human agents, friction in cross-departmental collaboration, delayed support, or disjointed responses—issues that are common with traditional ticket resolution. 

However, when you embrace customer service automation, AI-powered ticketing handles repetitive and time-consuming tasks like triaging requests and labeling to accelerate resolution time. This is important as HubSpot data suggests that 90% of customers seek immediate response, ideally within 10 minutes.

2.Reduces errors

Customer support errors usually stem from inadequate data handling, human errors during analysis, and siloed datasets, which affect cross-departmental access to essential information for request handling.

Inadequate handling includes duplicate datasets, inaccurate or incomplete data, and decayed data across different operational channels.

When cross-departmental data-sharing barriers exist, customer support can become fragmented and inefficient. A common scenario is when a customer representative responds to a ticket already handled by another department.

Due to these disconnected support offerings, Salesforce found that 55% of consumers once felt like they were speaking with different departments instead of a company.

Automated ticket resolution eliminates such errors by delegating repetitive, error-prone tasks to AI. With NLP and ML, these systems identify and remove duplicate or inconsistent data and ensure a cleaner, more accurate dataset.

Plivo CX’s omnichannel platform solves disjointed departmental collaboration by centralizing customer data and streamlining data communication. This prevents double ticketing and helps your agents track every request from start to resolution.

3.Round-the-clock availability

In a CM survey, 60% of respondents expect round-the-clock availability. Three in four GenZ and Millennial consumers also highly appreciate this. But that’s almost impossible with traditional ticket resolution.

On the other hand, automated ticket resolution leverages AI to operate 24/7 and handle customer requests even without human intervention. Businesses can also engage and resolve queries even when employees are out of the office or closed for the day. 

4.Cost-effectiveness

The cost to set up a functional customer support team depends on your business size, the number of customer requests you handle daily, and your industry. For instance, a business with over a hundred requests daily would need about five to ten human agents to be fully operational.

According to IBM, customer support costs businesses about $1.3 trillion annually. Moreover, according to Glassdoor, a customer support agent in the US earns an average of $45,000 yearly. Imagine having to build a team of five or maybe ten.

Embracing automated ticket resolution helps solve this budget problem by reducing the need to acquire more human agents. 

A single AI-powered ticketing system can handle hundreds of requests simultaneously and still operate at its peak. Besides, Plivo CX’s self-service chatbots reduce customer support expenses by over 30% annually.

5.Scalability and proactive support 

The more your business grows, the more customer requests you have to handle. That’s unavoidable. However, AI-powered resolution systems and workflow programs have been built to handle large scaling. Unlike traditional ticket resolution approaches, your software grows with your business, often at no extra expense.

Plivo CX’s customer support platform also offers proactive support, which is essential for automated ticket resolution. It does this by leveraging predictive analysis, NLP, and machine learning to anticipate customer needs based on past interactions or data and trigger appropriate workflows.

Plivo CX: Deliver top-notch customer experience with intuitive automation 

Efficient automated ticket resolution relies on powerful workflows. Plivo CX provides a no-code/low-code platform to easily design these workflows, guiding tickets from creation to resolution with NLP analysis, auto-responses, and escalations.

Drag-and-drop workflows, personalized components, and seamless integrations ensure a tailored and optimized customer support journey.

Interestingly, you don’t need to be a technical whiz to set one up, here’s how: 

In addition to that, Plivo CX offers several features, such as:

• Unified communication: As noted before, you can manage all customer conversations across channels like email, voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and live chat from a single, agent-friendly platform
• Seamless integrations: Connect Plivo CX with your existing tools, including CRM, ERP, helpdesk, home-grown systems, and more
• AI-powered automation: Deploy smart chatbots to handle routine inquiries, freeing up agents to focus on personalized support
• Data-driven optimization: Track real-time analytics and generate custom reports to gain insights into customer interactions and agent performance
• Communication with media support: Enhance interactions with multimedia support, including images, videos, and documents
• Increased productivity: Streamline workflows with message templates, internal notes, and skills-based routing
• Comprehensive features: Leverage call recording, IVR, multi-language support, and robust security features for a complete solution

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