How Otter.ai auto-solves 1K+ support tickets with AI

Ticket volumes grow, and expectations rise, but the size of your customer experience (CX) team rarely scales in tandem. For teams big and small, the challenge is always the same: How do you keep your queue clean, your customers happy, and your agents focused on what matters most?

That's exactly what Allen Lai was thinking when he joined Otter.ai as Head of Customer Experience. Known for its AI-powered meeting assistant, Otter.ai was scaling fast, but its support operations were stuck.

"When I first joined Otter, I was a team of one," said Allen. "We had just adopted Zendesk, but we had zero engineering resources to build integrations. Everything at the time was manual."

With limited developer support, Allen needed a way to scale smarter, not harder. By combining Zapier and AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Otter.ai eliminated thousands of repetitive tasks, prioritized critical requests, and let support reps focus on meaningful, high-value interactions.

Otter.ai's results at a glance

• 1,000+ tickets auto-solved in three months, reducing agent workload

• 10,000+ tickets prioritized using AI-driven tagging and sentiment analysis

• Backlog of tickets dramatically reduced through automation

• Doubled the size of the CX team without doubling manual effort

Closing tickets faster with AI

Otter.ai has lots of happy customers. If one of them replied to the support team with a simple "thank you," the message would reopen a ticket in Zendesk, unnecessarily clogging the queue. And that happened often. The team found themselves repeatedly closing out tickets that didn't actually need attention—a lovely but painful problem. 

"Each of these only took 5-10 seconds to close, but when you're handling thousands of tickets, that time adds up," said Allen.

So the team built a simple, powerful Zap (that's what we call automated workflows) to solve those tickets instantly.

Here's how the Zap works:

• When a ticket reopens in Zendesk, Zapier pulls the latest comment.

• This comment gets sent to ChatGPT for sentiment analysis.

• If it's just a thank-you message, the Zap marks the ticket "solved" and logs an internal note in Zendesk.

The results: Otter.ai automatically solved more than a thousand tickets in just three months, giving support reps time to focus on more complex, high-value cases.

But the benefits went beyond time saved. By reducing noise in the queue, reps could better prioritize critical tickets and deliver faster, more attentive service where it mattered. Allen estimates this automation alone reclaimed several hours of weekly bandwidth per agent, time they could now invest in customer conversations that actually needed a human touch.

AI-powered ticket triage for smarter prioritization

With ticket resolution under control, Otter.ai turned its focus to smarter prioritization, making sure the most important issues rose to the top, without leaving everyday questions behind.

But prioritization wasn’t just about who the customer was. It was about what they needed.

“We’re not just looking at domains to decide what’s important. We’re using AI to understand what the ticket is actually about—what category it falls into, how urgent it feels, and then prioritizing based on that," said Allen.

To do that, Otter.ai built a smart triage system that layers automation and AI. The goal? Surface the most pressing issues, without letting anything fall through the cracks.

Here's how the prioritization workflow runs:

• A new ticket is submitted through Zendesk.

• The Zap retrieves the requester's email address.

• ChatGPT analyzes the message to determine sentiment, urgency, and ticket type (like billing, bugs, or feature requests). It also checks the sender's domain, flagging corporate emails separately from free providers like Gmail or Yahoo.

• Using Filters by Zapier, tickets from corporate domains are prioritized for faster handling.

• Every ticket is enriched with metadata, sentiment, category, and domain type, and routed accordingly.

“Many companies and teams rely on Otter for critical moments like strategy sessions, all-hands meetings, and interviews,” Allen said. “So we prioritize resolving issues that might disrupt business operations.”

The results: Over 10,000 tickets have been automatically enriched and prioritized, reducing manual triage, speeding up response times for business users, and ensuring even emotionally charged or complex issues get the attention they need.

Supporting the press with faster response times

When journalists are on tight deadlines, they sometimes contact customer support teams in hopes of getting a quick response, and Otter.ai wants to meet that urgency with the same speed. But press inquiries aren’t always labeled clearly, and without a system in place, important outreach could easily get buried in the queue.

So Allen’s team built a workflow that helps the right people jump in fast—no detective work required.

Here’s how the process works:

• A new ticket in Zendesk triggers the workflow.

• AI by Zapier checks the requester’s email domain.

• Zapier searches a connected Google Sheet to see if the domain belongs to a verified news or media outlet.

• If it finds a match, the ticket is tagged as a “media inquiry” and routed to the appropriate PR or leadership team member.

The result: Press inquiries now get timely, thoughtful responses, helping Otter.ai support the media’s need for quick turnarounds, while streamlining PR communication without adding strain to the support team.

Building a future-proof CX strategy

For Allen, one of the biggest wins has been speed. "Zapier lets us build what we need when we need it. I don't have to ask for engineering resources or budget approval—I just build it myself in five minutes," he said.

Today, Otter.ai also uses Zapier to integrate Zendesk with Snowflake, simplifying how customer data flows into support operations. Automation isn't just a Band-Aid—it's a long-term strategy.

"We don't just want to patch holes, we want to build scalable, future-proof systems. Zapier is helping us do that," said Allen.

And they're not stopping there. Otter.ai is exploring ways to push automation even further, even building their own customer support AI agents that can handle tier-one support and deeper sentiment analysis across channels.

Allen's advice for anyone just getting started? "Start small, iterate, and don't be afraid to experiment. You'll be surprised at how much time you can save." With AI and automation powering its CX strategy, Otter.ai is setting a new standard for what efficient, scalable, customer-first support looks like.