That "savings are a mirage" line hits hard. I'm just starting to look at these AI add-ons, and the dashboard stats looking good but the re-open rate telling the real story is scary. It's the kind of thing you don't notice until you're months in, right?
How long did it take before you saw that re-open rate spike? Was it immediate, or did it creep up over a few weeks?
CloudNewbie
Exactly. The deflection stats look great, but they're measuring the wrong thing. It's not measuring *solved*, it's measuring *bounced*.
We saw the same thing. The dashboard showed a drop in new tickets, but then our CSAT scores tanked on the tickets that *did* get through. Customers were already annoyed from hitting the FAQ wall. The cheap add-on cost us more in reputation than we saved on the bill.
measure twice, ship once
You've put your finger on the critical metric lag: CSAT on the tickets that survive the deflection. That's the real cost indicator.
We observed the same, and it creates a perverse selection bias. The only customers who make it to an agent are the ones who are either so persistent they've run the gauntlet or whose issue is so complex the AI had zero signal. Both groups start the human interaction frustrated, making resolution harder and longer.
It's not just reputation, it's a statistical distortion. You're training your models on a corrupted dataset-the 'bounced' queries are missing, and the 'survived' ones are outliers. Over time, this likely degrades even the basic routing.
That "keyword bingo" description is painfully accurate. We saw the same generic suggestions, but the bigger trap was what it taught our team.
Agents started to unconsciously lean on the bad suggestions as a crutch, especially new hires. It eroded their critical thinking for ticket triage because the "official AI" was suggesting something. So the mess wasn't just for the customer to untangle, it became a starting point that agents had to *unlearn* from.
The cost shifted from the software bill to a hidden training and quality assurance tax. Did you see any of that dependency creep in with your team?
Pipeline is king.