A telecom provider’s tier-1 support queue was overwhelmed with repetitive account and billing questions, driving both high customer wait times and high agent burnout on low-complexity work.
Deploying a Planner-Executor Agent for Tier-1 Customer Support
Service Provided
Capabilities Utilized
Agentic Architecture, Tool Integration, SLA Design
Client challenge
Roughly 55% of tier-1 tickets involved a small set of repeatable actions — plan changes, billing disputes under a set threshold, and service restarts — but the existing rules-based bot could only handle simple FAQ lookups and routed anything more complex straight to a human queue, providing little real relief.
Our solution
We built a planner-executor agent with direct, scoped access to the billing and provisioning systems, able to actually execute the repeatable actions rather than just answer questions about them. The agent operates within tightly defined tool permissions and dollar thresholds, escalating anything outside its authority to a human agent with full context already gathered.
We rolled it out in three stages — read-only information lookup, then low-risk actions under $50, then the full authorized action set — with an SLA-monitoring dashboard tracking resolution time and escalation rate at each stage before expanding scope.
Results
The agent now autonomously resolves 38% of all tier-1 tickets end-to-end, with an escalation-to-human rate of just 6% on those resolved conversations. Average tier-1 resolution time fell from 11 minutes to 3 minutes for agent-handled tickets, and overall queue wait times dropped 29% as human agents were freed to focus on higher-complexity issues.
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