A practical guide to using AI to summarize phone calls and create tickets

A support agent hangs up after a call, but their work isn't done. Now, they have to quickly type up notes, trying to remember every important detail from the conversation to create a ticket. This is called After-Call Work (ACW), and it eats up a lot of time.

This manual process often results in notes that aren't consistent, details being missed, and longer wait times for the next customer. It's a frustrating situation for agents and a slowdown for the entire support team.

But there's a better way to handle this. The solution is using AI to summarize phone calls and create tickets automatically. This tech turns messy conversations into clear, useful data, giving your team more time to focus on what really matters: helping customers.

This guide will explain what this technology is, what to look for in a tool, how different platforms handle the problem, and how a modern solution can fit into your workflow without causing a major disruption.

The technology behind AI call summarization and ticket creation

Let's break down how this all works in simple terms. It starts with speech-to-text transcription, which converts the audio from a phone call into a written transcript.

Then, a Large Language Model (LLM), similar to the AI that powers tools like ChatGPT, reads and analyzes that transcript. It's been trained to understand conversations and pick out the important information: the customer's main issue, the troubleshooting steps taken, the final solution, any follow-up actions, and even how the customer was feeling.

The AI then creates a short, clean summary of the call. But it doesn't end there. It uses that information to do things like create a new ticket in your helpdesk, fill in fields like the customer’s name and problem type, and even add tags to send it to the right team.

This workflow shows how using AI to summarize phone calls and create tickets automates the entire process from analysis to resolution.

What you get is a perfectly documented customer interaction, created in seconds, without your agent having to type anything. This isn't just about saving a few minutes. It’s about creating a detailed, searchable history of every customer conversation, which is great for training, quality checks, and understanding your customers better.

Key features for AI call summarization and ticket creation tools

Before you start comparing tools, it helps to know what makes one stand out from the rest. Here are the main features you should look for.

Seamless integrations

This is a big one. Does the tool connect easily with your current helpdesk, like Zendesk or Freshdesk, and your phone system? Or does it require you to get rid of everything and switch to its own platform?

Many older solutions force you into a costly and disruptive "rip and replace" of your current software. That's a huge headache you don't need. Look for tools that offer simple, one-click integrations. This allows you to add AI features to your current workflow in minutes, not months, without needing a team of developers.

Customization and control

A generic AI summary that's the same for everyone isn't very helpful. Your business is different, and you need to be able to control what the AI does and how it does it.

Can you change the summary format to include the specific details your team needs? Can you adjust the AI's tone of voice to match your brand?

Even more important, can you decide what actions the AI can take? A really useful tool does more than just summarize. It should let you create custom workflows so the AI can automatically tag tickets for urgency, send them to a specific department, or even check a customer's order status in real time. This level of control is what makes it a real productivity booster.

A screenshot showing the customization and action workflow screen in eesel AI, illustrating how to control AI behavior when using AI to summarize phone calls and create tickets.

Learning from your knowledge base

A phone call doesn't just happen on its own. The best AI tools get this and can pull in information from all your existing knowledge sources, not just the call transcript.

Does the AI learn from your past support tickets to understand common problems and how your team talks? Can it connect to your internal knowledge bases, whether they're in a Confluence wiki, a folder of Google Docs, or your public help center? Bringing all this knowledge together is how you get AI-generated summaries and responses that are consistently accurate and make sense.

This infographic shows how eesel AI connects to various knowledge sources, which is crucial for accurately using AI to summarize phone calls and create tickets.

Different platform approaches

There are a lot of options out there, but they usually fall into a few categories, each with its own pros and cons.

The built-in helpdesk feature (like Zendesk or HubSpot)

Big helpdesk platforms are now offering their own AI features, including call summarization. For example, Zendesk has a "Copilot" add-on that can transcribe and summarize calls made through their Zendesk Talk product.

The main problem here is being locked into one vendor. These features are designed to keep you within their system. If you use a different phone system or want your AI to learn from information stored somewhere else like Notion or SharePoint, you're usually out of luck. Also, these features are often expensive add-ons to already pricey plans, and they might not be as advanced as what specialized AI platforms offer.

For instance, to get call summarization in Zendesk, you need to be on one of their higher-tier plans (starting at $55/agent/month) and then buy the Copilot add-on for an extra $50/agent/month. It works, but it's a restrictive and expensive option.

The enterprise contact center platform (like Observe.ai)

These are the big, all-in-one platforms built for large contact centers. They are very powerful, offering everything from AI agents to detailed conversation analysis and compliance monitoring.

But all that power comes with a high price and a lot of complexity. You can't just sign up and start using them. The process always starts with a required sales call, followed by long demos and a complicated setup that can take months. Their pricing is not transparent, it's hidden behind a "Talk to Sales" button and often includes large setup fees and long-term contracts. This model is just too slow and expensive for modern teams that need to be flexible.

The DIY approach (like AWS)

For companies with a lot of technical expertise, there's always the option to build a custom solution using cloud services. You could use Amazon Transcribe for speech-to-text and Amazon Bedrock for the summarization.

This approach gives you the most flexibility, but it requires a huge amount of engineering time and ongoing maintenance. You're responsible for building, scaling, and fixing everything. It's a massive project that takes your technical team away from your main business and isn't a practical choice for most support teams who just need something that works.

A better way: The modern, integration-first approach

So, what's the alternative to being locked in by your helpdesk, stuck with a complex enterprise system, or forced to build it all yourself? It's a more flexible approach: using a platform that's designed to work with the tools you already use.

This is where a solution like eesel AI comes in. It’s built to be very simple and to work smoothly with your existing tech.

Go live in minutes, not months

Unlike the big enterprise platforms, eesel AI is completely self-serve. You can sign up, connect your helpdesk with one click, and start setting up your AI agent on your own time. There are no mandatory sales calls or demos you have to sit through just to see the product. It just fits into your current workflows without making you change how you work. You can go from signing up to having a working AI in minutes.

Unify knowledge for the full picture

eesel AI is designed to break down information barriers. It doesn't just look at one phone call by itself. It connects to and learns from all your sources of information, including your past tickets, help center articles, Confluence pages, Google Docs, and more. This unified knowledge base gives the AI the complete picture it needs to create summaries that are not only accurate but also very relevant to your business and your customers' problems.

Test with confidence and deploy safely

One of the biggest worries about using AI is the risk of it making mistakes. eesel AI deals with this directly with a powerful simulation mode.

You can safely test your entire setup on thousands of your old tickets and call transcripts in a test environment. This lets you see exactly how the AI will summarize conversations and take action, giving you a clear idea of its performance before it ever interacts with a live customer. It’s a risk-free way to build confidence and fine-tune your settings.

A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation feature, which provides a safe environment for testing when using AI to summarize phone calls and create tickets.

Transparent and predictable pricing

There are no hidden fees or "call us for a quote" situations here. eesel AI offers clear pricing based on what you need. Importantly, it doesn't charge per resolution, which would mean you pay more for being successful. You can even start with a flexible monthly plan and cancel anytime.

Plan	Monthly Price (Billed Monthly)	AI Interactions/mo	Key Features for Call Summarization
Team	$299	Up to 1,000	Train on websites & docs, Copilot for help desk
Business	$799	Up to 3,000	Everything in Team + Train on past tickets, AI Actions (triage/API calls), Bulk simulation
Custom	Contact Sales	Unlimited	Advanced actions, multi-agent orchestration

Stop typing, start solving

Manually summarizing calls and creating tickets is an old way of doing things. It slows down your agents, leads to inconsistent records, and gets in the way of providing the fast, effective service that customers expect today.

Using AI to summarize phone calls and create tickets is no longer just an idea for the future; it's a practical solution that can make a real difference for your team's productivity and happiness right away.

While built-in helpdesk features can be limiting and enterprise platforms are often too complex and expensive, a modern, integration-first tool gives you the best of both worlds: powerful, customizable AI that’s easy to set up and works with the tools you already use.

By automating the boring work, you free up your team to spend their time and skills where it really matters: building relationships and solving customer problems.

Ready to eliminate after-call work?

Give your team the power of AI without the hassle. eesel AI connects directly to your existing helpdesk and knowledge sources to automate call summaries, ticket creation, and more.

Start a free trial to see it in action or book a quick demo with our team to find out more.