Triage is the automation that uses AI to "tag" tickets by populating a ticket field. That field can have business logic built around it in order to route support tickets to the correct team, group, or individual as quickly as possible.
Effectively routing tickets with Triage means selecting a ticket field that agents have to manually fill out in order to enable proper routing. This field should have a minimum of 250 usages for each possible field value. This will ensure that Forethought can train an AI model to accurately predict the correct field value. With Forethought automating the process of tagging support tickets, your agents can spend their time focussing on customer inquiries rather than manually triaging and routing tickets.
Best practices for preparing a field to be triaged
- Select ticket fields with values that don't have very much overlap. An example of overlap would be if a field has the possible values of 'login issues', 'SSO issues', and 'forgot password'. With overlapping values like the ones from this example, it is more likely that there will be issues for the AI to distinguish the difference between these three values. If you already have values that overlap, a good practice is to combine them into one category, for example, 'login issues', 'SSO issues', and 'forgot password' could all fit under the 'login issue' category. It is a good idea to go through the values and decide if there are any that could possibly be combined if they overlap.
- Forethought can also triage fields with dependencies (i.e., multiple fields that have a parent-child relationship). It is common for triage to be used to automate ticket tagging for "Category—Subcategory" fields. However, it is important to note that the more granular the field is, the more difficult it is to tag accurately. It is best practice not to triage more than three layers of a dependent-field taxonomy.
- Triage works best with dropdown fields and pick lists. Triage isn't configured to work with multi-select fields.
Testing Triage
The best way to test Triage is by creating a dummy ticket field for Forethought to update on the support ticket, ensuring that this field doesn't have any business logic tied to it. This will allow you to see how well triage is performing before predictions are written to the production field.
Note
When creating this dummy field, it is best practice to copy your existing field exactly or as exactly as your helpdesk allows (omitting associated business logic).
Once the dummy field is created, Forethought can write to this field, and you can compare the written value against the one that the agent selected on the production field. As soon as you are comfortable with how the model is performing in testing, you can set Forethought to begin writing to the production field instead. You can see how accurate Forethought was by checking your Forethought analytics dashboard under the Triage tab.
Business logic
You can take action based on Triage predictions by attaching business logic to the field that is being triaged. This is usually done with if-then statements. For example:
if field A = value D, then assign this ticket to team B
if field C = value Z, then assign this ticket to agent K
This business logic will allow tickets to be solved faster because the right agents will receive the right tickets sooner and with less manual effort. In this example, if the priority field is labeled as 'Urgent', then the ticket will be assigned to the 'Support' group.