Start with triage, not answers
Automatically answering customers is the visible ambition and the riskier one. Automatically sorting, routing and prioritising is nearly invisible and delivers most of the time saving with almost none of the risk.
A misrouted ticket costs minutes. A wrong answer sent to a customer costs considerably more.
What triage decides
- Category — billing, technical, sales, complaint, spam
- Urgency — from language, customer value and history
- Routing — which team or individual
- Sentiment, so an angry customer surfaces before a queued one
- A draft reply where the answer is documented and unambiguous
The draft is a starting point
The agent sees a draft with the relevant policy cited beside it. They edit and send, or they discard and write their own. Both are one keystroke, and the discard is logged as training data.
Agents accept roughly 60–75% of drafts with light editing on well-documented topics, which is where most of the time saving comes from.
What it must not do
- Send anything to a customer without a person seeing it, at least initially
- Make commitments about refunds, dates or entitlements
- Close a ticket automatically
- Answer where the knowledge base is silent — escalate instead
Measuring it honestly
First-response time, resolution time, draft acceptance rate, misroute rate, and satisfaction on AI-assisted versus normal tickets. The last one is the check that the saving is not being taken out of the customer experience.
We report all five weekly for the first quarter, then monthly.