The brand had grown faster than its support desk. Two people were answering roughly three thousand tickets a month, working evenings during a promotion, and losing the thread on the ones that actually needed a human — a damaged delivery, a wholesale enquiry, a complaint escalating in public.
The frustrating part was the shape of the queue. Two thirds of it was a single question with a known answer sitting in the order table: where is my order.
Homeware DTC brand · ~3,000 tickets/month · two-person support team · Concierge Agents, self-hosted · 6 days from kickoff to the agent owning tier one.
What they had already tried
A help-centre chatbot, installed the previous year and quietly switched off. It had been trained on the FAQ, so when someone asked where their order was, it explained the shipping policy. Customers learned to type "agent" immediately to skip it, and the deflection number on the dashboard was counting that as a win.
The lesson they took from it was the right one: the problem had never been the model. The problem was that nothing was connected to the order table.
What we did
Day one was the read side. Concierge was pointed at their catalog, their docs, and — the part the old bot never had — their live orders and shipments. That change alone turned "our standard delivery is 3-5 working days" into "it left the warehouse Tuesday, tracking says it is out for delivery today."
Days two and three were the write side, and that is where the limits got written. Address changes before dispatch: allowed. Reship a lost parcel under £40: allowed. Refunds: allowed under £25, held for approval above it. Anything involving a damaged item, a wholesale account, or a customer who has already complained twice: straight to a person, with the conversation attached.
Days four and five ran it in shadow mode. The agent drafted what it would have done, a human approved or corrected each one, and the corrections became the rules for the next day. Day six it went live on the widget.
The results
The old bot made customers wait to reach us. This one means most of them never needed to. — Head of Customer Care
The pattern
Two decisions did the work here, and neither was about the model. Connect the agent to the systems the questions are about, then write the limits in code before you turn it on. Shadow mode for two days is what turns those limits from a guess into something the team already trusts by launch.
Golam Mostafa wrote the code behind these results. Planning something similar? Talk it through first.