Hands-free fulfillment for routine customer requests

The problem

A lot of the customer requests coming in to our SREs followed the same steps every time. Some needed a quick approval in the middle, but none of them really needed an engineer’s judgment. They still took up engineers’ time, though, and customers had to wait for someone to get to them.

The approach

My team built a service on AWS that takes these requests from start to finish. When a request needs a sign-off, it goes to the right person for a light approval, and then the service carries out the work and closes the request on its own. Nobody has to pick it up from a queue.

The result

Those requests no longer land on an SRE’s plate, so the engineers can spend their time on work that actually needs a person.

Most small businesses have a version of this: a request comes in, someone checks it, and then somebody follows the same handful of steps they always do. That’s usually one of the best places to start automating.