Squelch Springs Forward with Similar Cases Feature

With the calendar turning over to April, winter has officially given way to spring. And just as the new season brings a sense of freshness to the landscape, so too is Squelch continuing to bring fresh features to our customer experience optimization solution.

Today I’m excited to announce the release of our Similar Cases feature, which will make the Squelch software even more powerful for customer support and success teams by turning the occurrence of ticket/case duplication from a problem into an asset. See below for all the details!

High Cost of Duplication

If you’re a front-line agent, you know how painful the problem of duplicate tickets can be. You’re talking to a customer about a problem, and you look up the problem in your knowledge base, but there are hundreds of tickets about the same thing. Some look useful, others less so, but you don’t want to spend your time sorting through them all, you want to give your customer a useful answer! When it comes to customer experience, every minute that ticks by comes with the risk of agent frustration, customer dissatisfaction, and harm to the business’s bottom line.

Moreover, the circumstances surrounding duplicate cases are often more complicated than an individual customer submitting multiple tickets regarding the same issue. When a front-line agent faces a request they haven’t seen before, the most efficient problem-solving approach is to see if other agents have previously confronted — and resolved — the same issue. The challenge, though, is that a single problem can be described in many different ways. So the existing text-based search available within the ticketing system will often fail to surface similar cases that would help the agent.

Let me give you two examples to illustrate my point. The questions “What is your car?” and “What is your age?” are 75 percent similar from a word perspective, but the meanings have little in common. In contrast, “What is your age?” and “How old are you?” are virtually identical from a meaning standpoint despite having zero word overlap.

How Squelch Can Help

Support and success teams need not fear, however. With the release of the Similar Cases feature, the Squelch solution will automatically identify and display cases that are similar to the one the agent is viewing — using similarity based on the underlying meaning of the issue rather than merely the words used to describe it. And best of all, through Squelch’s native integrations with ticketing systems like Zendesk and Salesforce, the functionality is available directly within the workspace the agent is already using. (An example is shown below for similar cases displayed within the Salesforce workflow.)

No longer will the same case have to be solved over and over again. This obviously has direct benefits for agents in making their jobs easier and for customers in resolving their issues faster. But, in lowering time to resolution, this new feature will also benefit managers by improving their team’s overall efficiency KPIs.

Moreover, the Similar Cases feature flips the very concept of duplicate cases on its head. Previously, duplication was a painful problem. But with automatic surfacing of similar cases (and answers), we are turning it not only into a non-issue from a knowledge management standpoint but a welcome fact of life for support and success teams. After all, if there is a similar case that another agent has already resolved, the issue will now present less work for an agent, not more.

Feedback, Please!

We’re very excited about our latest product release, as we believe the Similar Cases feature will make the Squelch solution even more helpful for customer support and success teams. But the ultimate judge of that, of course, is you! So please let us know your thoughts via email at or tweet us at @SquelchIO. We look forward to hearing from you!