How AI Automation Reduced Our Support Backlog by 60% (A Personal Case Study)
The moment that made us rethink everything happened on a Tuesday morning. Our shared inbox showed 147 unanswered tickets, and our tiny support team looked genuinely defeated. If you’ve ever wondered whether you can really reduce customer support backlog with AI, you’re not alone. We wondered the same. What followed surprised us: using AI automation in a targeted, careful way cut our backlog by 60% in six weeks, and it didn’t cost a fortune or require a technical team.
Why Reducing Support Backlog Matters for SMBs
Most small businesses don’t drown because of one big problem. They drown slowly, through dozens of repetitive questions piling up each day. When you’re handling fewer than 50 employees, every hour lost to chasing tickets hurts growth. Backlogs cause late replies, missed revenue, irritated customers, and stressed teams.
This is exactly why many SMBs look into ways to reduce customer support backlog with AI. Not as a vanity project, but because manual processes reach a breaking point. Recent research from Gartner shows more than 60% of SMBs struggle to keep up with customer communication across multiple channels. That stat didn’t shock us; we’d been living it.
Before using AI automation, our average resolution time hovered around 11 hours. Slow, inconsistent, and hard to explain to customers. What changed was not magic. It was simply applying AI in the right places, not trying to replace humans entirely, but clearing the path so our team could focus on the tricky stuff 🤝.
The Turning Point: A Personal Anecdote From Inside Our Team
Here’s the moment things shifted. Last month one of our support leads, Dan, came to our morning stand-up holding a spreadsheet that looked like a wall of red. Ninety-four tickets overdue. He said quietly, “I genuinely can’t see how we catch up.” That line stuck with me.
We’d already tested parts of Mando internally, but we hadn’t gone all in. So we connected our inbox, uploaded the FAQs we kept forgetting to update, and let our AI customer service agent start handling low-level queries. The impact was immediate. Within three days, around 40% of tickets were being resolved automatically through AI-powered replies and our updated help centre. Within weeks, the backlog dropped so sharply that Dan joked he didn’t know what to do with his mornings.
What we learnt: backlog isn’t caused by complexity. It’s caused by repetition. And repetition is exactly where AI shines.
What This Case Taught Us: Opinions That Might Challenge Assumptions
Most people think backlogs happen because teams are understaffed. We believe they happen because teams are overloaded with work that shouldn’t need a human in the first place. Here’s why that matters.
First, in our view, small businesses don’t need enterprise AI tools repackaged at a lower price. Those tools assume technical teams, onboarding time, and deep integrations. That’s rubbish for an SMB running on limited hours and limited patience.
Second, we think the industry exaggerates how “plug and play” support AI is. We’re transparent about this. AI works brilliantly only when you train it with real examples from your own customers. That’s why Mando lets you plug in your website, upload documents, and build a clean help centre quickly .
AI doesn’t replace your support team. It removes friction so your people can finally work on the issues that justify their skill. The result? Better morale, faster replies, and fewer unhappy customers.
And yes, we’ll say it: some businesses shouldn’t adopt AI support yet. If you handle fewer than 20 tickets a week, you probably won’t see a strong ROI. This balanced view builds trust, and trust is what your customers value most.
How We Reduced Customer Support Backlog With AI: Practical Steps You Can Use
Here’s your action plan if you're ready to reduce customer support backlog with AI in your own business:
Export your last 100 support messages.
Group them into 5-7 categories.
Identify which two categories contain the most repetitive questions.
Write the ideal response for each scenario.
Train your AI agent using those examples and publish a simple help centre article for each.
In Mando, setup takes a few minutes, not days. You can connect your inbox, import your FAQs, and publish your help centre without any technical skill required . These steps alone usually cut 30-40% of ticket volume in the first fortnight.
What This Means Going Forward
Reducing customer support backlog with AI isn’t about shortcuts. It’s about creating breathing space. Your team deserves that. Your customers deserve quicker answers. And your business deserves fewer late nights spent replying to the same six questions.
If you’re curious, ask yourself one question this week: Which customer issue wastes most of your team’s time? That’s where AI should start.
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