Automated assignment of helpdesk email tickets: An artificial intelligence life-cycle case study

Abstract

In this article, we present an end-to-end automated helpdesk email ticket assignment system driven by high accuracy, coverage, business continuity, scalability, and optimal usage of computational resources. The primary objective of the system is to determine the problem mentioned in an incoming email ticket and then automatically dispatch it to an appropriate resolver group with high accuracy. While meeting this objective, it should also meet the objective of being able to operate at desired accuracy levels in the face of changing business needs by automatically adapting to the changes. The proposed system uses a system of classifiers with separate strategies for handling frequent and sparse resolver groups augmented with a semiautomatic rule engine and retraining strategies to ensure that it is accurate, robust, and adaptive to changing business needs. Our system has been deployed in the production of six major service providers in diverse service domains and currently assigns 100,000 emails per month, on an average, with an accuracy close to ninety percent and covering at least ninety percent of email tickets. This translates to achieving human-level accuracy and results in a net savings of more than 50,000 man-hours of effort per annum. To date, our deployed system has already served more than two million tickets in production.