Wally, Director of IT at CookUnity, faced a challenge that would make most IT professionals break into a cold sweat: supporting 1,000 employees across corporate offices and field operations with a team of just two people. That's a staggering 500:1 ratio—five times the industry standard.

When Wally arrived at CookUnity, the IT help desk was already using Atlassian Assist integrated with Slack. Users were submitting questions, but that's where the good news ended. Requests weren't being routed or sorted correctly, first responses were delayed, and people were left wondering about their ticket status. For a company that operates 24/7 food production facilities, this wasn't just inconvenient—it was a business risk.

The Challenge: An Unsorted Pile with No Visibility

The fundamental problem was simple but severe: everything came into one giant pile.

"Everything came into a pile," Wally explained. "No segmentation, no priority given to different things. IT has to sort through the pile and decide what is important, what needs to happen, what's time sensitive."

The lack of searchability made things worse. Tickets would get lost. If someone needed to find a previous issue about "the Hoboken printer," searching for it in Jira wouldn't surface the relevant ticket. The team was flying blind.

But there was another problem eating away at their bandwidth: repetitive questions. The same questions were coming in 3-4 times a day—requests for Tableau access, WiFi passwords, software managed by other teams. Each one required manual attention, counted against SLA metrics, and all the agent could do was say "IT doesn't manage this, please reach out to this channel" before manually closing the ticket.

With an 8-hour average first response time and a 72-hour resolution time, it was clear something had to change.

The Solution: Intelligent Routing and AI Deflections

Wally had used Foqal at a previous company, so when he assessed the situation at CookUnity, he knew what was possible. After demoing the platform's newer features—particularly AI auto-resolutions—he made the switch in January.

The transformation came from two key capabilities:

1. Intelligent Segmentation and Routing

Foqal allowed the team to segment tickets by type and create separate queues for field operations versus corporate operations With proper segmentation, the team could prioritize revenue-impacting issues and ensure nothing slipped through the cracks.

An 8-hour reminder automation nudged agents if any ticket went unanswered, ensuring every request got attention.

2. AI Deflections for Repetitive Questions

Beyond the sorting problem, a significant portion of incoming tickets were questions IT couldn't actually help with—Tableau access requests, WiFi passwords, and software managed by other departments. Each ticket still had to be opened, read, responded to with a redirect, and manually closed. At 3-4 per day, these were eating hours every week while counting against SLA metrics.

Foqal's AI deflections solved this by connecting to CookUnity's Notion knowledge base. Now when someone requests Tableau access, the AI responds in 30 seconds: "Tableau is handled by the data team. Please request this in #data-help." It then asks if that answered their question. Yes means the ticket auto-closes. No means IT gets notified.

The result: 3-4 fewer manual interventions per day, freeing the team to focus on problems that actually require their expertise. For an already-understaffed team, that recovered time makes the difference between reactive firefighting and proactive support.