Target your noisiest ticket types first when adding AI support agents

Babbel, the language learning app, started by sorting its tickets to find the types that came in most often or caused the most friction for the team. Its Zendesk AI agents now handle questions such as subscription status, managing a subscription and changing the course language, across many languages. Babbel says more than half of tickets are now automated. Email, once over 65% of inbound contact, has dropped sharply, and over 45% of requests now arrive through messaging. Because tickets are classified and routed by skill, new hires only get issues they have been trained for, which cut onboarding from three weeks to one. Chris Boyd, who leads tooling and automation, describes the approach.