Not to toot our own horn here at Gumloop, but we have one of the most diligent and efficient support teams in the business. Waze, Rithin, and Team are so good, in fact, that customers created a little Slack icon for them in the shared channels. And yet no one’s done that for me. Come on.

But now a big part of their success is that they have their own support team. A team of agents working alongside them 24/7, preparing first draft responses to tickets, analyzing trends in tickets to share with the team, triaging tickets automatically. All of this so that they can focus on the most important thing: customers. Let’s build your customer support agent.

Now making good agents, support or otherwise, is broadly a three-step process. First, you teach the agent how you would do it in one threaded conversation. Then second, you ask the agent to memorize what it just did with a skill. And finally, have the agent run automatically with a trigger. If you do that over and over, your agent is going to grow in terms of functionality and impact on your team.

So for us, let’s create a support agent whose first job will be triaging tickets automatically. Now I’m in Gumloop and let’s create an agent. I’m going to go ahead and call it Support Bot. And for this agent to work properly, we have to give it access to the same tools as our support team. So I’m going to add in Zendesk so it can read and update tickets. Google Docs so it can read our internal documentation. Slack so it can send information to the team. Now that’s a good start and we can always add more apps and integrations later.

Now let’s start teaching this agent to triage tickets like we would. And start with this specific ticket, which is about billing. Now I’m going to ask the agent, “Can you get ticket information for me?” And it’s going to retrieve the information from this ticket, which we can see is just a standard billing question coming from a customer.

Now the agent doesn’t understand how we assign tags or our definitions in Zendesk of different tags. We have to help it here. That’s the teaching part. Now one way to do that is to say, “Look at tickets from the last three months, write yourself a guide on how we add tags” so it understands itself how we do that. Another way is to give it a document that it can read to understand. That’s what I have here with internal guidelines on how we use tags in Zendesk. Something like, “Read this Google Doc and update the ticket with the right tag.” It’s going to bring in that document, analyze it, and determine that billing is the right tag and update it directly for me in Zendesk.

Now that’s pretty cool. The next step in our process is sending that ticket to Slack to the right team. So I can say, “Can you send a link to this ticket to the billing Slack channel, letting them know there’s a new ticket?” and the agent will send it over for us. Now in this chat, it understands how we triage and where to send billing tickets.

Now it’s important to remember that agents have no memory between conversations, pun intended. If I go to a new chat and take that same ticket and ask the agent to assign the right tags, well they might figure it out, but it doesn’t remember the Google Doc, the Slack channel, our specific process.

So if we want this agent to do what we would every time (read the ticket, read our guidelines, update the tags, and then send a Slack message), we have to encode that process in a skill. Skills are a reusable set of instructions that an agent can refer to, to understand how you do things, how it should do things. Sounds complicated, but it’s actually really simple. Just have to ask, “Write a skill from this. So when I give you ticket information, you assign the right tags and send it to the right Slack channel.”

Now the agent will go through our conversation and write itself a little guidebook with step-by-step instructions. Now if I open a new chat and say, “Triage a new ticket,” the agent understands what I want because the first thing it’s going to do is read its skill and then follow it. And now that ticket has the right tags and the right team is notified.

Now obviously we don’t want to go and prompt the agent every time a new ticket comes in. That’s counterproductive. We want this to be done in the background automatically. So ask the agent, “Can you triage every new ticket that comes in?” This agent is going to set up for itself a trigger. Triggers are how you run your agents automatically in the background. Every new Zendesk ticket, the agent is going to wake up and send itself a prompt with the context of the ticket and what it needs to do.

And just like that, we now have an agent that can support our support team. They don’t have to triage tickets anymore. It’s done for them. Now this is a small slice, a small example of what’s possible with a support agent. You can deploy it in Slack so it can answer your team’s questions as well. Have an agent draft first responses to every ticket that comes in so your team has something to start from. You can even create a workflow that chains multiple agents together. One that analyzes responses, another that looks at profiles before handing them off.

Now I’m going to include some templates you can start from below this video. What’s important is go out there and build a support team for your support team.