Mapping the mess
We catalogued eleven thousand tickets from a single quarter and clustered them into thirty-one request types. Seven of those types accounted for two thirds of all volume, and every one of them was fully deterministic.
Designing the handoff
The hard part was not automation, it was the seam. I designed the moment where an automated flow admits it cannot help and passes the person to a human with full context already attached, so nobody repeats themselves.
Trust through visibility
Every automated action shows its reasoning in plain language and offers an undo. Adoption doubled after we added that panel, which told us the barrier was never speed.
Impact
Three thousand support hours returned annually, and the helpdesk team shifted toward infrastructure projects that had been deferred for two years.
