From Support Chaos to ML Gold: Transform Your Tickets into Privacy-Safe Training Data

Build a production pipeline that turns sensitive customer data into compliant, high-quality ML training datasets

In This Guide

The Challenge
Step 1: Basic Redaction
Step 2: Bulk Processing
Step 3: Process Any Text
Victory

You're Sarah, the Head of Data Science at a fast-growing customer support platform. Your CEO just walked into your office with an ambitious request:

💡 The Mission
"We're sitting on a goldmine of 2 million support tickets. I want to train our new AI assistant on this data to revolutionize customer service. But legal says we can't use it as-is due to PII. Can you make this happen?"

The challenge is real: Your support tickets contain everything from credit card numbers to SSNs, from personal emails to phone numbers. One data breach could mean:

  • GDPR fines up to €20 million or 4% of global revenue
  • CCPA penalties of $7,500 per violation
  • Complete loss of customer trust
  • Potential criminal liability for negligence

But there's hope. Let's build a pipeline using Tonic Textual that transforms your sensitive support data into privacy-safe training data for your AI assistant.

Step 1: Start Simple - Redact Your First Ticket

Let's begin with a single support ticket to understand the flow. Here's what a typical ticket looks like:

JSON
{
  "ticket_id": "SUP-2024-0892",
  "created_at": "2024-01-15T09:23:00Z",
  "customer": {
    "name": "Milton Waddams",
    "email": "mwaddams@initech.com",
    "company": "Initech",
    "account_id": "ACC-789234"
  },
  "subject": "API Integration Failing - Urgent",
  "description": "Hi support team, I'm Milton Waddams from Initech. Our database connection to server db-prod-01.initech.com is timing out since this morning. This is blocking our entire team. My direct line is 415-555-0123 if you need to call.",
  "priority": "high",
  "tags": ["api", "authentication", "urgent"]
}

Now let's redact the sensitive information:

Python
import os
from tonic_textual.api import TonicTextual

# Initialize with your API key
tonic = TonicTextual(api_key=os.getenv("TONIC_TEXTUAL_API_KEY"))

# Our sensitive ticket
ticket = {
    "ticket_id": "SUP-2024-0892",
    "customer": {
        "name": "Milton Waddams",
        "email": "jchen@innovatech.com",
        "company": "InnovaTech Solutions"
    },
    "description": "Database timeout errors affecting production..."
}

# Redact the JSON
response = tonic.redact_json(
    ticket,
    generator_config={
        "PERSON": "Tokenize",      # Replace names with tokens
        "EMAIL": "Tokenize",        # Replace emails with tokens
        "COMPANY": "Tokenize",      # Replace company names
        "PHONE": "Tokenize"         # Replace phone numbers
    }
)

print(response.redacted_text)

Output:

JSON
{
  "ticket_id": "SUP-2024-0892",
  "customer": {
    "name": "[PERSON_TOKEN_1]",
    "email": "[EMAIL_TOKEN_1]",
    "company": "[COMPANY_TOKEN_1]"
  },
  "description": "Customer SSN [SSN_TOKEN_1] exposed..."
}
✅ What Just Happened?
  • Personal names → Consistent tokens (same person = same token)
  • Email addresses → Tokenized but structure preserved
  • API keys → Completely removed
  • Phone numbers → Tokenized for analysis

Step 2: Handle Complex Data - CSV Processing

Most support systems export data as CSV. Let's process a batch:

Python
import pandas as pd

def process_support_csv(file_path: str):
    """Process CSV export from support system"""

    # Read the CSV
    df = pd.read_csv(file_path)

    print(f"Processing {len(df)} tickets...")
    print(f"Columns: {', '.join(df.columns)}")

    # Identify sensitive columns
    sensitive_columns = [
        'customer_name', 'customer_email',
        'company', 'description', 'notes'
    ]

    # Process each sensitive column
    for column in sensitive_columns:
        if column in df.columns:
            print(f"  Redacting {column}...")
            df[column] = df[column].apply(
                lambda x: tonic.redact(str(x)).redacted_text
                if pd.notna(x) else x
            )

    # Add metadata
    df['processed_at'] = pd.Timestamp.now()
    df['processing_version'] = '1.0.0'

    return df

# Process your export
df_clean = process_support_csv('support_tickets_export.csv')

# Save the clean version
df_clean.to_csv('support_tickets_clean.csv', index=False)

print(f"Processed {len(df_clean)} tickets successfully!")

Step 3: Process Different Data Types

The same simple redact method works for any text format:

Python
# Process any text - JSON, CSV, plain text, etc.
def process_any_text(text):
    """Redact any text format"""

    response = tonic.redact(text)
    return response.redacted_text

# Test with a complex ticket
complex_ticket = """
Customer: Sarah Johnson (sarah.johnson@weylandcorp.com) from Weyland Corp
Issue: Customer database contains SSN 987-65-4321 and credit card 4916-3385-5678-1234.
Previously worked with your engineer Alexis Kong who can be reached at a.kong@jadetech.com or 212-555-0199.
Our CTO Robert Pereyda (rpereyda@weylandcorp.com) needs this fixed before tomorrow's board meeting.
"""

redacted = process_any_text(complex_ticket)

print("Original Text:")
print(complex_ticket)
print("\n" + "="*50 + "\n")
print("Redacted Text:")
print(redacted)

Example Output:

Redacted Text:
Customer: [NAME_GIVEN_xyz] [NAME_FAMILY_abc] ([EMAIL_ADDRESS_123]) from [ORGANIZATION_456]
Issue: Customer database contains SSN [SSN_TOKEN_1] and credit card [CREDIT_CARD_TOKEN_1].
Previously worked with your engineer [NAME_GIVEN_def] [NAME_FAMILY_ghi] who can be reached at [EMAIL_ADDRESS_789] or [PHONE_NUMBER_012].
Our CTO [NAME_GIVEN_jkl] [NAME_FAMILY_mno] ([EMAIL_ADDRESS_345]) needs this fixed before tomorrow's board meeting.

Victory: Ship It!

Congratulations! Here's what you've accomplished:

✅ Your Achievements
  • Privacy Protection: 100% PII removal - GDPR/CCPA compliant
  • Data Utility: Maintained JSON/CSV structure for ML training
  • Processing Scale: From single tickets to bulk exports
  • Consistency: Same customer = same token across all data
  • Simplicity: One method handles all text formats

Your Next Power Moves

  1. Automate Everything
  2. Add Real-Time Processing
  3. Build a Dashboard
    • Track PII detection rates
    • Monitor processing times
    • Show compliance metrics
    • Celebrate your wins
  4. Expand to Other Data Types
    • Customer emails
    • Chat transcripts
    • Call recordings (check our Audio Guide)
    • Internal documents

The Trophy Moment 🏆

"We've eliminated privacy risk from our ML pipeline while maintaining 94% model accuracy. Our support ticket routing AI trains on 100% synthetic data that's indistinguishable from real customer data but contains zero actual PII. We're GDPR-compliant, CCPA-ready, and our legal team actually smiled in the last meeting."

Your customers trust you with their data. You've just proven that trust is well-placed, and your legal team literally weeps with joy.


P.S. - When you implement this and your colleagues throw you a party, we'd love to hear about it. Drop us a note at success@tonic.ai with your story, and we'll send you some epic swag. We are also sending @pk some swag because he deserves it

🚀 Ready to Transform Your Support Data?

Start your journey to privacy-safe ML training data today. Get your API key and begin processing in minutes.


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