Agent to Agent Workflows

Next-generation ticketing

A traditional ticket is a container. It stores what somebody typed and waits for a human to read it and work out what it is. A cognitive ticket arrives already understood — intent, urgency, the asset involved and the likely resolution path all determined before anyone opens it.

  • Intent, urgency and affected asset determined on arrival
  • A likely resolution path attached before anyone opens it
  • Triage stops being a manual reading exercise
  • The same understanding feeds routing and reporting

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A ticket that knows nothing about itself

A conventional ticket is a form with a body of free text in it. Everything that matters — what the request is, how urgent it really is, which asset it concerns, whether anybody has solved it before — sits in that text, unread.

So every ticket gets read at least twice: once by whoever triages it, and again by whoever works it, because triage produced a label rather than an understanding. The structured fields meant to prevent this make it worse — priority is set by the customer, who says high.

A table of the fields on a conventional ticket showing what each one contains and what it is actually worth, with the free-text body holding everything that matters and going unread until somebody opens it.
The structured fields that were meant to prevent a reading job are the least trustworthy data on the record.

What is determined before anyone opens it

Four things a person currently works out by reading, on every single ticket.

  1. Step 1

    What is actually being asked

    The intent is read from the text rather than taken from a dropdown, so what the ticket is about does not depend on a customer classifying a problem they have not diagnosed.

  2. Step 2

    How urgent it really is

    Urgency is assessed from the content, the asset and the customer context rather than from a priority field everybody has learned to ignore.

  3. Step 3

    Which asset it concerns

    The equipment involved is identified and connected to its own history, so the ticket arrives attached to what has happened to that unit.

  4. Step 4

    The likely resolution path

    What has resolved this before is established up front, so the ticket carries a starting point.

Four stages determined as a ticket arrives: what is being asked, how urgent it really is, which asset it concerns and its history, and the likely resolution path.
The second panel is where the gap is widest: the priority field says high, and the content says the line is down.

One difference, and everything that follows from it

The change is not a feature. It is what the system knows about a request.

Understanding, not storage

A conventional ticket is a container that holds text. A cognitive one has read it. Routing, prioritisation, reporting and automation all become possible off the back of that single difference.

The structured fields stop being fiction

Priority set by the customer and category chosen from a dropdown are the least trustworthy data on the ticket, and every report inherits that.

Triage stops being a reading job

Reading every incoming ticket to decide what it is consumes real capacity and produces only a label. Removing that is an entire activity that no longer has to happen.

Two panels contrasting a conventional ticket that stores text with a ticket whose content has been read, listing what each one makes possible for routing, prioritisation, reporting and automation.
Everything in the right-hand panel follows from one difference, which is why it is worth treating as an architectural choice.

Why the usual approaches fall short

Each of these tries to get structure without anybody reading the request.

Mandatory fields on the intake form

Asks a customer to classify a problem they have not diagnosed.

A triage rota

Accurate, and it spends real capacity reading tickets to produce labels.

Routing rules on keywords

Fire on wording rather than meaning. The rule set grows forever.

Priority set by the customer

Everything is high. The field ends up carrying no information whatsoever.

Two columns comparing mandatory intake fields, a triage rota, keyword routing rules and customer-set priority with a ticket whose content is read on arrival.
Every one of them tries to obtain reliable fields from somebody who has not yet diagnosed their own problem.

What things are called

Terms that separate this from a conventional ticketing conversation.

Cognitive ticket
A request whose content has been understood on arrival rather than merely stored.
Intent
What the customer is trying to achieve, as distinct from the words they used.
Triage
Deciding what a request is and where it goes, before anyone works on it.
Affected asset
The specific piece of equipment a request concerns, linked to its service history.
Resolution path
What has resolved this issue before, attached to the ticket up front rather than found later.

Frequently Asked Questions

Not necessarily. The change is in what the system understands about each request, and that understanding can be applied inside the ticketing system you already run. Most teams keep their system of record and add the reading layer to it.

Where this fits

Ticket intent tour

The reading underneath all of this: what the customer meant rather than what they typed.

Auto categorisation tour

The issue type applied on arrival, and how requests spanning more than one are handled.

Ticket-free resolution tour

The more radical version of the same question: which of these interactions needed a ticket at all.

More Agent to Agent Workflows tours

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Agent to Agent Workflows

Compare it against your own triage

Take a week of tickets your team has already triaged and let us run them through. Where the two disagree is where the interesting conversation starts.

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