AI in service operations: How we keep 24/7 service teams sharp with Agentic AI, without working overtime

When a digital service is handed over to 24/7 operations, decision makers face an immediate challenge: they must keep their staff skilled, knowledgeable, and ready to act at all times, to the highest standard. This is critical for maintaining service reliability in unexpected, high-stakes moments and ensuring staff can perform under pressure, where every response matters.

In such round-the-clock operations, constant changes to shift schedules, protocols, workflows, and team setups make maintaining readiness even harder, especially when staff are forced to take on overtime or rely on time-consuming extra training, which can quickly drain team motivation. 

When building our Service Operations team, we experienced these challenges firsthand. Being a digital innovation agency vested in delivering complex, often critical infrastructure products, we analyzed the situation and decided to develop our own solution to the problem. In this article, we’d like to share how AI SmartDrill, our in-house Service Operations Agentic AI training solution, helped us boost our support team’s readiness without pushing them to their limits, and how it can do the same for other businesses facing similar challenges.

Scaling service teams while keeping them on their toes

At Supercharge, we have been providing continuous services to our clients for over 5 years. Our offerings include everything from 24/7 Level-1 to on-call Level-2 to Level-3 product support for our solutions. As our Service Operations team took on more high-stakes projects over the years, we scaled our support team to keep pace. This growth meant an increasing operational complexity for our team, who now not only had to maintain the quality of service, but also ensure that every new feature of the platforms we operate was understood by every new staff member.

From our conversations with clients, it became clear we’re not alone with this problem: growing service teams at modern organisations often struggle to keep up with constantly evolving products when relying on traditional onboarding, training, and assessment methods. 

What makes our situation even more complex is that we operate critical energy infrastructure projects with strict SLA commitments, so it is absolutely essential that our team is on top of their game at all times. This includes the ability to solve “the world is ending” type scenarios within short deadlines with no margin for error. In real life, these scenarios (luckily) never or rarely occur. However, when they do, the operator needs to be able to identify it, refer to the appropriate procedure, and execute it without hesitation. This scenario isn’t unique, either – similar emergency situations can happen in other industries as well, such as aviation. Pilots don’t often face these, yet they always know exactly what to do. How? Pilots practice every scenario over and over again on simulators with regular drills and trainings.

SmartDrill AI: an intuitive tool to keep your team’s critical knowledge accurate and action-ready

When ideating about possible solutions, our requirements were simple. We needed a digital tool that was able to:

• Keep the service ops team’s knowledge fresh by testing readiness through various scenarios 
• Assess their performance transparently, and provide instant results to the candidate and management so gaps are caught before they cause problems.
• Provide a flexible, individual training solution 24/7 without the need for taking extra shifts or any management interaction.
• Keep the onboarding smooth by helping new team members get up to speed quickly without slowing down the rest of the organisation.  
• Come up with an effective method for evaluating L1 staff’s knowledge of the new feature release scope.

To meet all those needs, we turned to LLMs. Their excellent ability to assess responses against a knowledge base allowed us to be able to score and feed back on the response immediately in a constructive manner.

From implementation, through fine-tuning to improved readiness

Back in June, we collected around 60 drill scenarios typical for our use cases for the initial dry-run phase, which we used to fine-tune the model, tweak prompts, and iron out flaws in the knowledge bases. Throughout August, we closely monitored the outcome of the assessments, took the L1 agents’ feedback on board, and made significant advancements to the code and the model.

To our surprise, we also found that it wasn’t just the model that needed perfecting but our operational procedures, too. From the AI assessments, it became clear that some of the procedures were not phrased in a foolproof way, and some even contained contradictions. This exercise provided a brilliant opportunity to refine these alongside the more technical improvements.

Since September, the tool has been an integral part of our quality assurance processes for L1 on our BritNed Empire and Eleclink Helix platforms, and it has already provided the Service Operations Management team with valuable insights into areas of improvement. We’ve run over 2,000 drill scenarios across our entire support team, leading to several targeted follow-up training sessions to strengthen identified weak areas. As a result, our support teams’ average scores are showing an upward trend in response quality, currently averaging just under 4/5. Overall, our AI-driven service operations training solution helps maintain Supercharge’s high service standards, ensuring every team member is fully prepared to tackle any challenges that arise in day-to-day operations.

How we tailor the SmartDrill system to unique needs

Since its launch, we’ve extended SmartDrill AI to additional projects with niche requirements and gathered client feedback on their expectations for implementing an AI-based assessment platform. Requirements ranged from on-premise operation for security, to adaptive learning from user responses, to internet-enabled contextual knowledge gathering.

These insights enabled us to design SmartDrill AI as a fully customizable solution, adaptable to different team sizes, industries, and use cases, so it can quickly become a valuable tool for any service team facing similar challenges.

If you’d like to explore how SmartDrill AI could be tailored to your team, we’d be happy to walk you through the possibilities.