American Fashion Brand Cuts AHT 53% and Wait Time 62% in 90 Days with a Unified Support Platform

The Client

Our client is a fast-growing American fashion brand loved for its trend-driven collections and seamless online shopping experience.

The Helpware Environment

Helpware provides fully managed customer support via phone and email handling product inquiries, order and payment processing and app-related technical issues.

The Challenge: Handling Peak Ticket Surges Without Adding Headcount.

The client needed faster support resolution during new launches, sales booms, and seasonal peaks—when ticket volume surged as much as 65 percent—but resisted adding staff.

Agents struggled with high ticket spikes because of the following constraints:

• Basic FIFO routing, with no call prioritization or skill matching
• The company’s knowledgebase was outdated and unstructured
• Common/repetitive inquiries had to be answered individually

These factors resulted in extended wait times, which hurt customer satisfaction.

Helping ‘Ware’ It Counts: Automated Responses, Intelligent Routing, and Robust Knowledgebase to the Rescue

• Forethought Solve integrated with Zendesk automated responses to repetitive inquiries, deflected 30 percent of “Where’s my order?” tickets, dynamically generated return and refund updates, and set up dynamic macros for the top 20 repetitive scenarios.
• Zendesk’s intelligent routing categorized tickets by topic, segmented agents into Tier 1 (General Support) and Tier 2 (Specialized Support), and prioritized VIP customers using profile-based tagging.
• Revamped knowledge base made for faster AI search; articles were tagged by product line, issue type, and priority level to enable AI indexing; we also launched quarterly reviews to keep content fresh.

The Results: Faster Support During Peaks Without Compromising Quality or Expanding Headcount

• Average Handle Time dropped 53%, from 8.5 minutes to just 4 minutes.
• Wait time for first response dropped 62% from 4.2 hours to 1.6 hours.
• Ticket capacity increased by 68%
• CSAT rose to 90.75%
• All with zero increase in headcount!