Customer Experience
Summarize Support-Ticket Root Causes
Analyze a supplied ticket corpus for evidence-backed recurring themes while separating symptoms, hypotheses, conflicts, and unproven causes.
Quick facts
- Best for
- Owners · Founder-operators
- Prompt type
- Quality
- Expected result
- Evidence-based root-cause themes with corpus-quality limits, traceable counts, separated symptoms and hypotheses, Unknowns, and a human-reviewed investigation plan.
- Time saved
- 2-4 hours per ticket review
- Required inputs
- SUPPORT TICKET CORPUS · ANALYSIS WINDOW · CATEGORY DEFINITIONS · SEVERITY RULES · OWNERSHIP DATA · KNOWN CHANGES · MINIMUM EVIDENCE THRESHOLD
- Works with
- ChatGPT + Claude
What this prompt does
- Groups supplied support tickets into traceable themes with counts, evidence references, and confidence limits.
- Separates observed symptoms from possible causes and preserves low-evidence conclusions as Unknown.
When to use
- When a support leader needs a bounded review of recurring ticket patterns before choosing investigation or improvement work.
When not to use
- Do not use it to declare fault, make compensation decisions, contact customers, close tickets, or update source records.
- Do not place unauthorized ticket data or unnecessary personal, sensitive, or confidential data in an AI system.
The prompt
#CONTEXT:
Summarize recurring support-ticket themes and possible root causes for human review. Analyze only the supplied corpus and rules. This is an evidence review, not a final causal finding or authorization to change operations.
#INPUTS:
- Authorized, minimized ticket corpus with stable ticket references: [SUPPORT TICKET CORPUS]
- Start date, end date, timezone, and inclusion rules: [ANALYSIS WINDOW]
- Approved issue categories and definitions: [CATEGORY DEFINITIONS]
- Approved severity levels and criteria: [SEVERITY RULES]
- Supplied team, queue, product, and process ownership data: [OWNERSHIP DATA]
- Verified releases, process changes, outages, or other known events: [KNOWN CHANGES]
- Minimum ticket count and evidence quality required for a root-cause hypothesis: [MINIMUM EVIDENCE THRESHOLD]
#INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Validate the corpus boundary. Report duplicates, missing dates, conflicting fields, sampling limits, and Unknown coverage before analysis.
2. Do not invent, infer, or fabricate policy, eligibility, customer facts, outcomes, ticket content, counts, owner responsibility, fault, or root cause.
3. Classify tickets only against the supplied category and severity definitions. Keep unmatched or ambiguous tickets in an Unknown or conflict group.
4. Produce exact counts and percentages using the included corpus as the denominator. Show the calculation and never generalize beyond the analysis window.
5. Separate observed symptoms, recurring themes, correlations, and possible root-cause hypotheses. A hypothesis must meet the supplied evidence threshold and cite ticket references plus any known change; otherwise label it Unknown or insufficient evidence.
6. Do not infer customer intent, employee performance, legal responsibility, or fault from ticket language or correlations.
7. Recommend investigation questions and internal evidence to collect. Do not route, assign, close, resolve, delete, archive, or update a ticket, account, record, or system.
8. Do not issue or recommend an automatic refund, credit, compensation, retention offer, discount, exception, admission, or customer communication based on aggregate themes.
9. Use only authorized ticket data and authorized customer data in an approved AI workspace or approved AI vendor. Minimize the data and redact or omit unnecessary personal, sensitive, or confidential data. Follow company retention and vendor policy.
10. A named human owner must approve every refund, credit, or compensation decision before action. A named human owner and legal counsel must approve every admission of fault or liability before action. A named human owner must approve every retention offer, discount, or policy exception before action. A named human owner must approve every external communication, sending action, or customer contact before action. A named human owner must approve every ticket, system, account, or record change or mutation before action.
#RESPONSE FORMAT:
## Corpus quality and Unknowns
- Included and excluded records
- Duplicate, missing, and conflicting data
- Analysis limitations
## Evidence-based root-cause themes
| Theme | Ticket count | Percentage | Evidence references | Symptom or hypothesis | Threshold status | Confidence limit |
|---|---:|---:|---|---|---|---|
## Unresolved hypotheses
- Hypothesis — missing evidence — investigation question
## Human-reviewed investigation plan
| Proposed investigation | Named owner | Evidence needed | Prohibited action |
|---|---|---|---|Input checklist
- SUPPORT TICKET CORPUS
- ANALYSIS WINDOW
- CATEGORY DEFINITIONS
- SEVERITY RULES
- OWNERSHIP DATA
- KNOWN CHANGES
- MINIMUM EVIDENCE THRESHOLD
Example input
Fictional example — SUPPORT TICKET CORPUS: 24 redacted Northstar support records with IDs JS-201 through JS-224; four lack a resolution category and two appear duplicated. ANALYSIS WINDOW: July 1-30, 2026, America/New_York; include closed and open onboarding tickets created in-window. CATEGORY DEFINITIONS: access, scheduling, documentation, billing, other. SEVERITY RULES: Level 1 safety/security or multi-customer outage; Level 2 blocked delivery; Level 3 guidance request. OWNERSHIP DATA: Support owns intake, Operations owns delivery, Finance owns billing. KNOWN CHANGES: Scheduling form v2 released July 14; no verified outage supplied. MINIMUM EVIDENCE THRESHOLD: At least five non-duplicate tickets plus one independent operational record before naming a root-cause hypothesis.Expected output structure
- Evidence-based root-cause themes with corpus-quality limits, traceable counts, separated symptoms and hypotheses, Unknowns, and a human-reviewed investigation plan.
Customize this prompt
- Use stable ticket references instead of copying names, email addresses, or full message bodies into the analysis.
- Set a threshold that matches your sample size and require operational evidence beyond customer wording before naming a cause.
Guardrails
- Do not invent, infer, or fabricate policy, eligibility, customer facts, outcomes, ticket content, counts, ownership, fault, or root cause; unsupported items remain Unknown and conflicts remain unresolved.
- A named human owner must approve every refund, credit, or compensation decision before action.
- A named human owner and legal counsel must approve every admission of fault or liability before action.
- A named human owner must approve every retention offer, discount, or policy exception before action.
- A named human owner must approve every external communication, sending action, or customer contact before action.
- A named human owner must approve every ticket, system, account, or record change or mutation before action.
- A named human owner must approve every payment or financial decision before action.
- A named human owner must approve every deletion, closure, suspension, termination, revocation, deactivation, or archive action before action.
- A named human owner must approve every promise or commitment before action.
- Use only authorized ticket data and authorized customer data in an approved AI workspace or approved AI vendor; minimize data, redact or omit unnecessary personal, sensitive, or confidential data, and follow company retention and vendor policy.
- The assistant must analyze the supplied corpus only and must not take customer, financial, legal, ticket, or system action.
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