How can i auto-route support tickets without creating too many exceptions?

[PaulGJ]

I’m trying to set up a system to automatically route customer support tickets to the right team based on content, but I’m stuck on how to define the rules without creating a huge backlog of exceptions. My current workflow automation seems to misclassify anything with ambiguous language, and I’m not sure if I need more detailed conditional logic or a different approach entirely.

[Joseph.A]

I can relate I started with keyword based routing and a few simple intents It felt fast at first then ambiguous language kept slipping tickets into the wrong team We added a catch all for ambiguous cases and a weekly human triage to reassign the tricky ones The backlog still grows but at least the misroutes are not all going to the wrong group

[Ella55]

I tried a large decision tree with dozens of rules and exceptions It looked good on a slide but in practice it required constant updates and every new phrasing broke a branch We ended up with a general queue where anything fuzzy lands and gets assigned by a person after review

[Jacob.T]

Are you sure the problem is misclassification or is the underlying taxonomy the real issue I found that a lot of the confusion came from vague labels rather than the classifier so maybe the first fix is to sanity check the labels

[PaulVJ]

If you want a simple path try starting with a small set of buckets and a human to handle anything not a clear match Then measure how many tickets land in the unsure bucket and how many get correctly routed after a reassign Make notes on what phrasing or topics trigger a mismatch and adjust the taxonomy slowly If you can set a time box for the first pass you might avoid endless rules