Before anyone can solve a support ticket, someone has to figure out what it is, how urgent it is, and whether it’s part of a bigger problem. Clients rarely see that step, but it shapes how quickly and how well every request gets resolved.
Every request that reaches a service desk needs a category, a priority, and enough context to send it to the right person. That work is repetitive, involves many clicks, and has to be done tens of thousands of times a year. With the help of Lindsay Mahley and colleagues across the service desk, we built an AI-assisted triage workflow that now handles much of that preparation automatically. The result is ticket prep that takes seconds instead of minutes, which leaves the team more time for clients.
The Problem: Triage Took Time People Should Spend on Clients
Manual triage meant a series of clicks, dropdowns, and checkboxes on every incoming ticket, typically taking two to three minutes each. On a single request, that sounds manageable. At Xantrion’s scale, it isn’t. The team handles roughly 50,000 to 60,000 tickets a year, which adds up to an estimated 1,700 to 3,000 hours of triage annually. That was time dispatchers spent on data entry instead of on judgment calls and conversations with clients.
Why Build In-House Instead of Buying
Development began in January, when the team started building the workflow on an automation platform. Building rather than buying was a deliberate choice. Client requests carry nuances that an off-the-shelf triage product might not handle well. Building in-house let the team shape the automation around how Xantrion supports its clients, instead of reshaping proven processes to fit a packaged tool.
How the Workflow Works
When a ticket arrives, the workflow takes on three tasks that dispatchers used to complete by hand.
It categorizes the request. The system started by learning the types of tickets the team receives, and AI within Tines, the automation platform behind the workflow, was later added to strengthen that judgment. It can, for example, tell a printer issue apart from an incoming email.
It sets priority. Rather than introducing new rules, the workflow applies Xantrion’s existing impact-and-urgency matrix, the same framework dispatchers already follow.
It summarizes the ticket. In about 30 seconds, each ticket arrives with a category, a priority, and a concise summary, ready for a dispatcher to review and act on. Work that once took two to three minutes now takes a fraction of that.
Finding the Bigger Incident Behind Individual Tickets
Triage isn’t only about handling one ticket at a time. The workflow also looks back over the past week for related tickets from the same company, such as several people reporting trouble with the same application, file, or printer. When it finds a connection, bundling those tickets together can raise their impact and priority, reveal a wider incident that might otherwise go unnoticed, and allow the team to fix the problem once instead of troubleshooting with each person separately.
For clients, the benefit is straightforward: shared problems are recognized sooner, and employees spend less time repeating the same troubleshooting steps.
Keeping Important Vendor Alerts From Getting Lost
Not every important message comes from a client. Third-party notices, such as Microsoft warnings about deprecated settings or regional outages, can look like routine noise in a busy queue. The workflow processes these notices alongside client requests, which keeps legitimate alerts from being dismissed as spam and lowers the risk of missing a change that later affects clients. In this way, automation saves time and also strengthens the reliability and security of the environments Xantrion supports.
Consistency That Scales
The system isn’t configured separately for each client. Instead, it applies one priority model across every client Xantrion supports, so new clients can be added without retraining it. That consistency is what makes the approach durable. When standards are clear and applied the same way everywhere, automation becomes easier to scale and easier to trust.
“Everything’s important, but not everything is super urgent… The model is trained on our impact and urgency matrix, and it applies that to all of our clients.” – Lindsay Mahley
Keeping People Involved
Automation handles the preparation. People still make the decisions. Dispatchers review each ticket, confirm the next step, and talk with clients directly. That division of labor reflects Xantrion’s live, human dispatch model: the service desk gets faster without losing the personal handoff that clients value.
Lessons for IT Leaders Considering Service Desk Automation
Xantrion’s experience offers a practical starting point for organizations weighing similar automation in their own service desks.
- Start with repeatable, high-volume work. The strongest candidates are tasks where a few minutes per ticket add up across thousands of requests.
- Write down the rules first. Xantrion’s impact-and-urgency matrix already existed, so the automation applied established standards rather than inventing new ones.
- Pick the tool that fits your processes. Off-the-shelf products may not handle the nuances of your requests, so choose a platform flexible enough to match how your team works.
- Look past single tickets. Grouping related tickets helps you spot larger incidents and resolve them once.
- Include vendor and system alerts. Routing these notices through the same workflow keeps important changes from being filtered out.
- Measure the result. Compare time per ticket and capacity gained before and after implementation to confirm the value.
The Takeaway
Automation works best when it removes repetitive preparation and leaves judgment and client relationships with people. For Xantrion’s dispatch team, the bigger result isn’t speed alone. The team has gained capacity, sets priorities more consistently, and spots wider issues sooner, all while keeping a person at the center of every client interaction.
Looking for a service desk that pairs smart automation with responsive, human support? Discuss your support requirements with Xantrion.
