How RetailMax Cut Support Costs by 62% With an AI Agent That Customers Actually Prefer

Results at a glance

The Challenge

RetailMax was handling 14,000 support tickets per month across email and live chat. With a team of 11 agents, average first-response time had climbed to 6.2 hours, and 68% of tickets were repetitive tier-1 queries — order status, return policies, shipping estimates. Agent morale was low. CSAT had slipped to 3.8/5.

Our Solution

We built a custom AI support agent trained on RetailMax's product catalog, return policy, shipping rules, and 18 months of historical ticket resolutions. The agent was deployed on their Zendesk instance with deep integrations into their order management system — enabling it to pull real order data and take actions like initiating returns and updating addresses.

How We Built It

1. 1

   Audited 6 months of tickets to identify the top 12 query categories covering 74% of volume

2. 2

   Built and connected a knowledge base with structured policies, FAQs, and resolution playbooks

3. 3

   Integrated with Shopify and ShipBob for real-time order data retrieval

4. 4

   Deployed on Zendesk with smart routing: AI handles tier-1, escalates tier-2 with summary

5. 5

   Two-week supervised launch with 100% human review before responses were sent

6. 6

   Progressive autonomy rollout over 6 weeks, reaching full deployment