We’ve officially launched Ticket Automation — making omnichannel automation one step closer. For us, it represents a new way to leverage AI-driven automation for productivity, optimize costs by moving away from manual processes and towards greater efficiency.
With the new Ticket Automation solution, busy customer service teams can now eliminate repetitive ticketing tasks and send automated replies. The results? Improved ticket handling times, reduced backlogs, happier customers, and less stressed agents.
This new offering is built on our proprietary AI technology, built from scratch in 2016, and complements the existing suite of automation offerings. Here’s how Reetu Kainulainen, our CEO, summed it up at our recent launch event:
“With Ticket Automation, we’re applying the conversational AI systems we’ve built on the chat and messaging side over the last three years into ticketing.”
From automating chats to ticketing, we are proud to celebrate another milestone in our mission of revolutionizing the way customer service teams work.
So, what exactly are the benefits of AI-powered Ticket Automation for customer service teams? Let’s run through them.
Eliminating routine tasks
With automation, manual tasks like tagging tickets and updating custom fields (e.g. status or priority) are eliminated. This allows agents to be more productive and focus on high-intelligence tasks.
Research firm Gartner predicts that “by 2022, 70% of customer interactions will involve emerging technologies such as machine learning (ML) applications, chatbots and mobile messaging, up from 15% in 2018.” Additionally, according to research from McKinsey, with currently available AI technology, it is possible to automate up to 45% of routine and repetitive tasks people are paid to perform.
This McKinsey data aligns well with what we’re observing with our customers as well.
As Reetu highlighted during the launch, “When it comes to ticket automation, we haven’t seen solutions that bring a lot of great results in the market. We’ve seen solutions that automate maybe below 10% of tickets. But as we worked with our customers and started to apply the same technology that we have on the chat side, we were actually surprised and excited to see results similar to what we see on the messaging side. We see up to 70% of tickets being recognized and tagged correctly, and then, depending on the customer, we see automation rates between 30 to 60%.”
Sending automatic replies for simple tickets
Support tickets related to simple queries can be easily handled by virtual agents. But our intelligent virtual agent is not just any old chatbot that provides robotic-sounding answers to customers and leads to more frustration.
Through advanced natural language processing, our virtual agent can reply in human-sounding ways, in all the languages you need. You can either create automated workflows to reply to tickets and resolve the case, or to request further information needed from the customer.
“We’re applying the same technology we have on the chat and messaging side at Ultimate into ticketing, so the same transformer models (the next-generation of the latest natural language processing) that allow us to build a polyglot AI, the neural networks that transfer learning to supermodels that have high accuracy rates with drastically less data — are all available for Ticket Automation,” emphasized Reetu during the product launch.
Not only that, because virtual agents don’t get tired like humans, you can send intelligent replies to customers at any time of the day or night, 24/7. The AI system is always learning and improving — so that replies sent to your customers are accurate and contextual to your business and your industry.
Read more about the benefits of Ticket Automation
Reducing large backlogs
By automating a huge chunk of replies, Ticket Automation also plays a significant role in reducing ticket backlog and serving more customers, quicker — without compromising on quality.
During the launch event, Jamie Hopper, Customer Service Manager at Pockit, a fast-growing fintech company, explained how Ultimate supported him and his team during a challenging time when they were facing a high backlog of tickets.
When Jamie joined Pockit, the customer service team was facing a huge backlog and low manpower, as they were relocating their operations to a different city. Additionally, their backlog had ballooned due an issue with a third-party payment provider that caused many customers to have issues with transacting.
When he was told that the company was already in discussions with an AI partner to alleviate the situation, Jamie's initial reaction was one of worry. “If I’m being completely honest, I was genuinely worried that things would go horribly wrong.” But after having a few calls with the team, those fears “were put to rest almost straight away” and he had the confidence that Ticket Automation would be able to help him solve his challenges. And the results speak for themselves:
“In just two months, we were able to reduce our backlog of 17,000 emails to less than 1,000. We also reduced our response time from weeks to under two days, thanks to Ultimate’s Ticket Automation.”
- Jamie Hopper, Customer Service Manager, Pockit
Providing great customer experience
Automating repetitive ticketing tasks reduces the time agents spend handling tickets. In some cases, where automation can provide instant replies, it reduces average handle time dramatically. This improves overall response time and first-call resolution (FRC) and helps customers get what they need, faster — leading to improved customer satisfaction.
According to a white paper published by SQM Group, for every 1% improvement in FCR, there is a 1% improvement in customer satisfaction (CSAT).
Redirecting agent bandwidth to higher value tasks
When human agents are freed from mundane tasks, their time and energy can be directed to higher-value tasks. All the behind-the-scenes work, like extracting relevant information, updating it in the ticket, and adding the appropriate tags - can be done by the AI. By the time the ticket is routed to the agent, the agent can focus on doing what they do best. This could be more complex cases that offer fresh challenges, and on higher-level tasks (eg. training and building virtual agents) that allow them to advance their careers.
Increasing customer happiness has a direct impact on employee satisfaction as well. For every 1% improvement in FCR (which virtual agents help with), there can be a 1% to 5% improvement in ESAT (employee satisfaction), according to the same SQM Group white paper.
Optimizing and saving costs
Automation not only frees up agent bandwidth and time, it saves additional hiring costs. It can provide 24/7 coverage as well as additional support during peak periods. It also provides teams with the capability to handle tickets in a wide range of languages without the need to hire additional multilingual agents.
Scaling up operations
Tapping into AI means that operations can be scaled up with no limitations. You just need to set up the automation once, and you can reply to all recurring queries automatically. This drastically cuts down ticket backlogs and improves handling times, allowing you to serve more customers, quicker — without compromising on quality.
Even without automating replies, Ticket Automation can reduce backlog just through ticket cleansing, or merging of duplicate tickets.
Alexandra Henderson, our Product Manager, explained during the event that with Ticket Automation, “you can select a number of different parameters (the request, the customer’s name, the topic tag, and so on) and our virtual agent can check against your backlog and see whether any tickets in the backlog meet the same criteria as incoming tickets. Similar tickets can then be merged together.”
Often, impatient customers tend to reach out on a number of different channels, as they want to get an answer fast — but the query might be for the same issue.
“Suddenly, you have four tickets in your backlog instead of just one. With the help of Ultimate’s virtual agent, you can send one reply to the customer and solve four tickets at one go.”
- Alexandra Henderson, Product Manager, Ultimate
Staying in control with actionable insights
Automating daily tasks doesn’t have to mean giving up control. Our system is fully transparent, allowing you to see what’s going on at all times, from automation rates, to actions taken, and to intent detection accuracy.
This allows for quick adjustments on the go to ensure you get the best possible results from combining automation with human agents. Additionally, you’ll be able to access full Conversation Logs, which capture the details of all actions and interactions on each ticket.
Seeing results quickly
We pride ourselves on being a no-code platform. This means that without needing technical knowledge, you can integrate Ultimate with your CRM platform in seconds. The user-friendly interface allows you to set up automation workflows quickly and easily. We also provide a high level of guidance and support from our in-house customer success team — to help you succeed in creating a customer experience that delivers results.