Deploying automated ticket router across the enterprise

Abstract

With the recent advances in machine learning, the use of natural language processing (NLP) technology to support various business processes has been increasing. This paper discusses the use of NLP to route more than one million live client tickets annually to the appropriate service personnel in 67 support missions across IBM. Each mission supports a product family with multiple support teams, each requiring different skills for the engineers. We discuss three important aspects of such a large-scale deployment: (i) The use of a centralized team with a common machine learning infrastructure and practices to support the entire enterprise. (ii) The processes and quality of such a deployment from the perspective of one support mission, namely, IBM's z/OS family. (iii) Careful monitoring of the deployed models to detect drifts in the routing behavior. Despite vast differences in the technical contents of the support missions, it is possible to define common processes and metrics across the enterprise, without requiring a dedicated machine learning team for each mission. In addition, we provide examples of the business policies and metrics from the perspective of the z/OS mission to demonstrate the utility of the approach and the outcome.