Cisco wanted to scale its digital help engineer that assists its technical help groups world wide. By leveraging its personal Splunk expertise, Cisco was in a position to scale the AI assistant to help greater than 1M instances and unlock engineers to focus on extra complicated instances, making a 93+% buyer satisfaction score, and making certain the essential help continues working within the face of any disruption.
In the event you’ve ever opened a help case with Cisco, it’s seemingly that the Technical Help Middle (TAC) got here to your rescue. This around-the-clock, award-winning technical help workforce companies on-line and over-the-phone help to all of Cisco’s prospects, companions, and distributors. In truth, it handles 1.5 million instances world wide yearly.
Fast, correct, and constant help is essential to making certain the shopper satisfaction that helps us keep our excessive requirements and develop our enterprise. Nevertheless, major occasions like essential vulnerabilities or outages can trigger spikes within the quantity of instances that slow response occasions and rapidly swamp our TAC groups, affecting buyer satisfaction in consequence. we’ll dive into the AI-powered help assistant that assists to ease this concern, in addition to how we used our personal Splunk expertise to scale its caseload and improve our digital resilience.
Constructing an AI Assistant for Help
workforce of elite TAC engineers with a ardour for innovation set out to construct an answer that would speed up concern decision occasions by increaseing an engineers’ capacity to detect and clear up buyer issues. the was created — it’s greater than an AI bot and fewer than a human, designed to work alongside the human engineer.
Fig. 1: All instances are analyzed and directed to the AI Assistant for Help or the human engineer primarily based on which is most applicable for decision.
By instantly plugging into the case routing system to research each case that is available in, the AI Assistant for Help evaluates which of them it may simply assist clear up, together with license transactions and procedural issues, and responds on to prospects of their most popular language.
With such nice success, we set our eyes on much more help for our engineers and prospects. Whereas the AI Assistant for Help was initially conceived to assist with the high-volume occasions that create a major inflow of instances, it rapidly expanded to incorporate extra day-to-day buyer points, serving to to scale back response occasions and imply time to decision whereas constantly sustaining a 93+% buyer satisfaction rating.
Nevertheless, as using the AI Assistant grew, so did the complexity and quantity of instances it dealt with. An answer that after dealt with 10-12 instances a day rapidly ballooned into lots of, outgrowing the methodology initially in place for monitoring workflows and sifting by means of log knowledge.
Initially, we created a technique generally known as “breadcrumbs” that we tracked by means of a WebEx area. These “breadcrumbs,” or actions taken by the AI Assistant for Help throughout a case from finish to finish, had been dropped into the area so we may manually return by means of the workflows to troubleshoot. When our assistant was solely taking a small quantity instances a day, this was all we wanted.
The issue was it couldn’t scale. Because the assistant started taking up lots of of instances a day, we outgrew the dimensions at which our “breadcrumbs” technique was efficient, and it was not possible for us to handle as people.
Figuring out the place, when, and why one thing went incorrect had develop into a time-consuming problem for the groups working the assistant. We rapidly realized we wanted to:
- Implement a brand new methodology that would scale with our operations
- Discover a resolution that would supply traceability and guarantee compliance
Scaling the AI Assistant for Help with Splunk
We determined to construct out a logging methodology utilizing Splunk, the place we may drop log messages into the platform and construct a dashboard with case quantity as an index. As a substitute of manually sifting by means of our “breadcrumbs,” we may instantaneously find the instances and workflows we wanted to hint the actions taken by the assistant. The troubleshooting that might have taken us hours with our unique methodology might be completed in seconds with Splunk.
The Splunk platform gives a strong and scalable resolution for monitoring and logging that permits the capabilities required for extra environment friendly knowledge administration and troubleshooting. Its capacity to ingest massive volumes of knowledge at excessive charges was essential for our operations. As an business chief in case search indexing and knowledge ingestion, Splunk may simply handle the elevated knowledge circulate and operational calls for that our earlier methodology couldn’t.
Tangible advantages of Splunk
Splunk unlocked a degree of resiliency for our AI Assistant for Help that positively impacted our engineers, prospects, and enterprise.
Fig. 2: The Splunk dashboard gives clear visibility into capabilities to make sure optimized efficiency and stability.
With Splunk, we now have:
- Scalability and effectivity: Splunk screens the assistant’s actions to make sure it’s working appropriately and gives the power for TAC engineers to watch and troubleshoot workflows, permitting the assistant to effectively scale. The AI Assistant for Help has efficiently labored on over a million instances so far.
- Enhanced visibility: With dashboards that permit for fast entry to case histories and workflow logs of our assistant, the TAC engineers overseeing the processes save time on case critiques to ship quicker than ever buyer help.
- Optimized processes with real-time metrics: The visibility into useful resource allocation permits us to optimize our enterprise processes and workflows, in addition to show the worth of our resolution with real-time metrics.
- Proactive monitoring: Splunk ensures all APIs are totally functioning and screens logs to alert us of potential points that would affect our AI Assistant’s capacity to function, permitting for fast remediation earlier than buyer expertise is impacted.
- Increased worker and buyer satisfaction: Engineers are geared up to deal with larger caseloads and effectively reprioritize efforts, decreasing burnout whereas optimizing buyer expertise.
- Lowered complexity: The dashboards have a easy interface, making it a lot simpler to coach and onboard new workers. The benefit of use additionally serves to enhance the capabilities of the people working our AI Assistant by enhancing their accuracy and effectivity.
By offering a scalable and traceable resolution that helps us keep compliant, Splunk has enabled us to keep up our dedication to distinctive customer support by means of our AI Assistant for Help.
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