How Kojo Increased Ticket Deflection from 0% to 50% Using Pluno’s Deflection AI

Sarala Conlan

So, we're a B2B SaaS company with a really small support team that I manage. There's five of us in total, including myself, on the support team. We do well over a thousand tickets a month, so high volume, small team, and managing a pretty complex product as well, with lots of different features and different product areas that go into it as well.

Syed Ali

And if you were to name one of the biggest problems that you were experiencing before you started looking for any AI solutions, what would that be?

Sarala Conlan

Yeah, time. Agent time especially. We really like the functionality with Pluno to be able to use AI to create Jira tickets when we're escalating to our engineering team, and also the Deflection Agent functionality. Both of those save a huge amount of time for the agents, and like I mentioned, it's a small team. So that's a big impact.

Syed Ali

And how were you doing it before Pluno?

Sarala Conlan

Just manually, no deflection agent. We use Zendesk. We did try their one that comes with the plan. It's really basic, but it wasn't quite for us. So we didn't have any type of chatbot that was helping with any of our tickets.

We were also completely by hand filling out all of our fields for Jira tickets.

Sarala Conlan

When we escalate to engineering, we have a really high bar of making sure that that Jira ticket includes a lot of really relevant information, so that when a developer takes a look, they can solve it as quickly as possible. So there are a lot of fields that, if you are escalating to Jira, do need to be filled in.

So doing that manually by hand takes a long time. And when you're a small team and you have a lot of tickets coming in your queue, setting aside the time and being able to handle that while handling your response metrics to all the other tickets, it takes a lot.

Syed Ali

Do you also get a lot of repeat questions?

Sarala Conlan

Yes and no. Since we've implemented the Deflection Agent, we're not seeing those as much in the ones that our live agents are handling. We do have a complex product. Any type of question that could be imagined that could be asked, we get.

Yes, now and then there are some repeat questions. We have help center documentation that makes it really easy to send to folks, but we do get a lot of questions that we've never seen before every day.

Syed Ali

And before, were you using any other tool for deflection?

Sarala Conlan

Not for deflection, no.

Sarala Conlan

We have internal AI tools that we use, but nothing that's customer-facing. It is a really complicated product. So we are still using an internal AI tool as well that connects to our GitHub, our code, which we really treat kind of as our source of truth with such a complex product. So when we get really strange questions and really nuanced things that people are reaching out about, it's a helpful tool for that.

Syed Ali

And time-wise, how long did it take you to handle a ticket before versus now?

Sarala Conlan

Yeah, that's tricky, right? Because it's going to depend on the ticket subject matter. But if we're looking at something that's complex, that involves escalation to engineering and a lot of deep troubleshooting by maybe our technical support team, previously that could easily go into someone's backlog because of how much time it takes to make the ticket, and take an extremely long time to actually fully escalate that to Jira.

Now with Pluno, we're able to escalate things to Jira that same day. Nothing's going in the backlog when we're just waiting to make a ticket. We're not waiting on: do I have the time to take away from my queue to actually fully make this ticket for engineering?

I know that there's other AI tools that you can use, agents to be able to maybe fill in the fields, right, that we have for our Jira tickets, but Pluno has this extra integration where, when we create the ticket with Pluno, it's already connected to the Zendesk ticket. And we love that Pluno's automatically commenting on the ticket if the customer is asking for updates. We're getting internal comments on the Zendesk ticket from Pluno when the Jira ticket is updated. That back and forth communication is huge, and I haven't seen it personally in any other AI tools that we've explored.

Syed Ali

Are you using any other module besides deflection and the Escalation Copilot?

Sarala Conlan

We are. So also the internal copilot that's available, that is really helpful, especially for new hires, when we're maybe a little bit stuck on what should my next troubleshooting step be. It's really helpful when I'm maybe at a loss for what else I can possibly do to troubleshoot an issue before I escalate it to our technical team. I always give it a look, like maybe it has a suggestion that I haven't tried yet, and that's helpful.

Sarala Conlan

We have two new agents that joined recently. I do see it help them with their response times, especially because we're an international team. So some of our agents, English isn't their first language, but all of our customers are in the United States, so English is their first language. So we communicate to them in one language. So having them being able to see suggested responses that are rich in context is really helpful when they're starting to learn, to still be keeping up with those response times.

I check weekly on the Pluno analytics to see what the Deflection Agent is doing, and it's really huge. I mean, consistently, I've never seen it go below 30%, and sometimes I've seen it even go slightly above 50%. Those are really great percentages to see, especially because my team is tight and we're always really busy. So to be able to know that, hey, this huge percent of tickets we didn't have to touch is really reassuring.

That's a huge impact. Even just thinking about the well-being of my agents and how they're able to just not reach burnout, things like that. That's really big for our team. And then having those moments where we're able to create really rich, detailed Jira tickets for our engineering team that are appreciated by them, and we're not getting tickets into our backlog because we have to escalate to engineering and we have such a complex ticket form that we need to fill out, is huge for my agents as well. It just saves an inordinate amount of time.

Syed Ali

And how is it for your customers when they interact with the AI agent?

Sarala Conlan

Yeah, it's maybe a little bit of a rocky start for them. We serve construction companies, so they're a little bit old school. They're pretty hesitant to technology and change as a personality type. So I know some of them just don't like the idea of interacting with an AI agent. So that was a little bit of something to get them used to.

I think it just comes with time and trust in interacting with the agent to see that they can get their answers. I think, honestly, I've seen them warm up to it. I did set up a workflow with Pluno that if they just type the word 'human' and they're clearly requesting to talk to someone, it'll just pass it to us right away. Giving them that out is nice, because then they feel like, okay, I don't have to interact with this AI agent if I don't want to. But building trust is really big.

I've seen them even type out really great feedback to the agent, which is nice to see. For those people who maybe didn't realize, even though it's labeled very clearly this is a chatbot, that they were interacting with an AI agent, or maybe they were apprehensive, but they were asking a question while they're in the middle of their workday, they just need an answer and they got some really good, quick information, I think that's really encouraging for them to change their mind on it. If there's people who are still hesitant, I think that showing them that they're going to get fast, accurate, helpful information is the best way to change their mind.

Syed Ali

What was the response from your team's side? Were they excited about it? Did they have any reservations? And how did it go then?

Sarala Conlan

Yeah, I think that a lot of folks had questions about how is this going to work? What's going to happen to these tickets? How do we handle them? What does it look like when it comes over? But nobody was too worried about it.

We were especially in a moment where we had unexpectedly had someone leave our team. So we were down an agent and we really just needed extra hands. So at that time, people were really excited to be able to understand that, hey, a percentage of your tickets, you're not even going to have to touch. They were all on board.

We're still such a small team and we're still stretched. I think that we would be probably absolutely drowning, though, if we didn't have the extra help of Pluno. So that's huge.

Syed Ali

To someone who is in exactly the same position as yourself, and who might have tried other AI solutions or might be completely new to it, what would you say?

Sarala Conlan

There's so much on the market, and it feels sometimes like new things pop up every day, which, I mean, they do. AI is growing really fast, especially for support teams. It's really helpful to be able to test things out. I know you guys make demos available for people, and trial periods, so that you can make sure this really works for your team.

I really want to call out to other folks that are considering things: there are so many options. There's even options where you can customize and write your own LLMs, which is so great. But what really sets Pluno apart is that integration between Zendesk and Jira and Pluno. That's huge. Having updates on your tickets automatically in Zendesk from the linked Jira tickets is a game changer.

Your follow-ups become extremely on point. There's nothing that's missed back and forth between support and engineering. I would highly recommend that portion of it. My team is a huge fan. They feel like they could not live without Pluno now. So I appreciate the product.