Autonomous support & triage

Most support volume is a short list of questions asked many times. The cost is not the answering. It is the interruption, and the good questions waiting behind the routine ones.

• A measured baseline first: what actually arrives, and how much of it repeats.
• The repetitive band handled automatically, with everything else routed to a person.
• Answers drawn from your own documentation, so it says what you would say.
• Deflection reported as a measured number rather than promised as one.

• A measured baseline of what your support load actually consists of, before anything is automated.
• Answers drawn from your own documented material rather than invented on the spot.
• Handoff rules, so a person takes over at the point you decide.
• Everything logged, with transcripts you can read.
• A monthly review of what it got wrong, which is the part that improves it.

Before automating anything, find out what it would be automating.

1. Take the last fifty support messages and sort them into repeated questions and genuine one-offs.
2. The repeated ones are the candidates. If that pile is small, this is not your problem and you should spend the money elsewhere.
3. Check how long the average first reply takes. Often the complaint is not the answer, it is the wait.

What we cannot tell you yet. Published deflection rates in this field are vendor marketing rather than research, so we quote none of them. The absence of a trustworthy industry number is exactly why the first thing sold here is a measured baseline of your own.