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How a support team answers repeat questions with sources
A support team uses Runlance to draft answers to repeat questions, always citing the tickets and docs behind them and approved by a person.
B2B software company
−38%
repeat tickets
2 min
to a first draft
0
unreviewed replies
The challenge
The support team at a B2B software company handled a steady stream of tickets from customers across several time zones. When the Support Lead reviewed a few months of history, a pattern stood out: around twenty questions came up again and again. How to reset access, how to export data, why an invoice changed, how a specific setting worked.
Each of those questions had a good answer somewhere. Some lived in the help docs, some in earlier replies, some only in the memory of a senior agent. Finding the right one took time, and two agents often answered the same question in two different ways.
Onboarding made it harder. New team members needed weeks to learn where the right answers lived. Until then, they either asked a colleague or wrote a new answer from scratch, which slowed the queue and sometimes contradicted the docs. Senior agents spent a growing part of their day answering internal questions instead of customer ones.
The team had considered automatic replies before and rejected the idea. The Support Lead was clear: customers should never receive an answer that a person on the team had not read and approved. Any solution had to keep people in control and show where each answer came from.
The solution
The team connected Runlance to its help desk and docs tool, with read access limited to public help articles and closed tickets. A workflow runs every morning before the first shift starts.
The agent groups new tickets that ask similar questions. For each group, it drafts a reply that cites the help article and one or two previous replies it relied on. The drafts appear next to the tickets, ready for review, usually within a couple of minutes of the run starting.
A support agent opens the draft, checks the sources and decides. They can approve it, edit it or request changes with a note. Nothing is sent to a customer until a person on the team approves it. The activity log shows which tickets and pages each draft used, so the Support Lead can spot outdated articles quickly.
Two side effects mattered as much as the drafts. First, recurring groups showed which help articles needed rewriting, and updating them reduced how often those questions came in. Second, new team members learned the right answers by reviewing cited drafts, instead of searching on their own.
The team now treats the morning workflow as part of its routine, not as an experiment.
The drafts are good, but the sources are what made the team trust them.
Support Lead
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One more team that hands a weekly task to Runlance and keeps a person in charge of every result.
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