A support agent that resolves, not deflects
Order-aware AI support across email and chat, wired directly into their OMS with strict approval gates for refunds and address changes.
68%
tickets fully resolved by AI
41s
median first response
4.7/5
post-resolution CSAT
The problem
Their existing chatbot deflected tickets rather than resolving them, and customers had learned to type “agent” immediately. Seasonal volume spikes meant hiring temporary staff who were never fully trained. The brief was explicit: no answer the company would be embarrassed to have sent.
What we did
01
Evaluation before build
We started by labelling 1,200 historical tickets into resolution classes and building a scored test set. Nothing shipped until it beat the human baseline on that set — which meant we could also prove where it should not be used.
02
Grounded in their systems
The agent reads order status, shipment tracking, returns policy and product data through typed tools. It answers from what it can see, and says it cannot see something rather than guessing.
03
Approval gates on anything costly
Refunds, address changes and order cancellations require an explicit action the agent proposes and a human confirms — above a threshold. Below it, the action is auto-approved and logged. The threshold is a setting an operations lead can change.
04
Cost per resolution as a design constraint
Cheap models handle classification and retrieval; the expensive reasoning model is reserved for genuinely ambiguous cases. Caching and routing kept the cost per resolved ticket well under a dollar at peak.
Where it landed
Just over two thirds of tickets now close without a human touching them, and satisfaction on AI-resolved tickets is marginally higher than on human-resolved ones — mostly because the median first response fell from hours to under a minute. Support headcount was redeployed to retention rather than cut.
“They talked us out of two features we asked for. Both would have been mistakes.”
Details
Engagement
11 weeks to production
Technology
Next step
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