Freshworks offers AI-powered capabilities through Freddy AI Insights, which are available to all users of the Enterprise plan in Freshdesk.

The power of Root Cause Analysis: Moving beyond descriptive insights

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) enables organizations to move beyond surface-level insights and uncover actionable, fundamental factors that can be addressed to enhance customer experiences and improve business outcomes.

Benefits of Root Cause Analysis

1. Identify the underlying factors

By pinpointing the fundamental root causes, organizations can address the real issues rather than just the symptoms.

2. Understand causality

RCA helps determine the relationships between underlying factors and issues, allowing organizations to identify the most influential factors and prioritize them for action.

3. Enable problem-solving

RCA provides the basis for developing targeted strategies, interventions, or solutions to address underlying problems and leverage positive factors that drive desirable outcomes.

4. Improve decision-making

RCA enhances data-driven decision-making processes by providing a comprehensive understanding of the factors that contribute to specific insights or outcomes.

5. Enable proactive measures

Enabling preventive actions, process improvements, or targeted interventions based on insights highlighted from RCA can equip organisations to take proactive measures to prevent the recurrence of similar issues.

Enabling Root Cause Analysis

Whenever a user accesses the Freddy AI module in Freshdesk, they will see a list of all the insights that are proactively generated. These insights are user-role-based; therefore, only relevant insights will be shown to each user.

• Users just need to select any insight to get a deep dive into the leading root cause.
• The root causes are presented in an intuitive tree map representation, with each node (box) representing a specific piece of data.
• There is also a summary in natural language, which simplifies the interpretation for users.
• The “View all causes” option allows users to examine all the other contributing factors in greater detail.

Root Cause Analysis in Action

This is an example of how Root Cause Analysis helps users explore insights, identify underlying causes, and take action on tickets.

1. Users access the Freddy AI module and discover Proactive Insights on the left bar.
   
2. On selecting the insight, the user will see a chart, which visually depicts the insight trend.
   
   
3. Following the trend graph is the Root Cause Analysis, which includes a brief, easy-to-understand summary and a tree map that visualizes the primary factors contributing to the insight.
4. You can click Visual representation of leading cause to explore the underlying causes.
   
5. From the tree map, users can click a node to view the tickets associated with it. The list of linked tickets then appears, as shown below.
   
   
6. Clicking a ticket link opens its detailed view page.

You can use this feature to:

• Quickly validate whether the RCA is directionally correct
• Investigate edge cases or false positives
• Share context with stakeholders such as agents or supervisors
• Take operational actions like reassigning or updating tickets

Example Explained

In the above example, the insight is about a surge in total ticket count compared to previous weeks.

The first node (box) of the tree map shows the ticket category ‘Payment Failures’ insight, which has increased from 145 tickets. Similarly, it also shows that the subcategory ‘Card declines’ has an increase of 81 tickets, which is higher than other subcategories under Payment Failures.  

As we examine the linkages in the connected nodes, the surge in ticket volume is related to the EU region, specifically the Email channel.

Conclusion

Root Cause Analysis is a powerful tool for moving beyond surface-level data insights. By identifying the underlying factors, understanding causality, enabling problem-solving, improving decision-making, and facilitating proactive measures, RCA empowers organizations to make meaningful improvements and drive better business outcomes. Using methods like Root Cause Analysis ensures a focused and efficient approach to uncovering the true causes behind observed data trends.

Implementing RCA in your organization will help solve current issues and pave the way for continuous improvement and long-term success.