What’s top of mind for customer service professionals this year? Growth — ideally, without stretching resources even further. According to our recent survey, 40% of respondents say scaling support is their main focus for 2025, even ahead of improving the quality of their customer experience.
Artificial intelligence seems like the obvious answer for scaling customer support. But customer service professionals know things aren’t quite so cut and dried.
In fact, 73% of respondents flagged customer resistance to AI interactions as a major obstacle. And, when Gartner research reveals that 64% of customers say they’d prefer that companies didn’t use AI for customer service, these concerns are justified.
But here’s the thing: support teams and customers likely have the wrong idea of what leveraging AI looks like. Modern AI systems go beyond limited-use chatbots and basic integrations to help customer service teams predict customer behavior, resolve complex issues, and exceed even the loftiest of customer expectations.
Sound like a pipe dream? We have the proof. Let’s take a closer look at 10 different companies using AI for customer service and how they’re using these AI tools to provide a top-notch customer experience — and not just for routine tasks and robotic FAQs.
The contact center is no stranger to AI technology. According to McKinsey, contact centers have been early adopters of generative AI. But AI’s role in customer support has quickly evolved. As automation trends show, we’ve moved well beyond using AI technology for basic functions to full-scale optimization of your support operations.
Use cases of AI customer service are constantly expanding — and they’re not slowing down anytime soon. Today, modern AI support tools can help teams:
AI can change your entire support workflow. AI tools can optimize even your more complex processes like ticket routing, escalations, and approvals. Less intervention from your human agents means fewer bottlenecks and errors. That leads to faster resolution times and a better experience for your customers.
Recent research shows that a smooth omnichannel experience is non-negotiable for customers. 86% of consumers say they expect conversations with agents to move seamlessly between channels, whether they reach out via email, chat, phone, or social media. AI-powered solutions ensure that customer interactions are cohesive across all of your different channels, which eliminates confusion or miscommunications and ultimately improves your customer satisfaction.
It’s easy to think only about the customer-facing applications of AI tools, but they can be just as helpful for your support agents by providing real-time insights and suggested solutions. Rather than scrambling for information, human agents can receive AI-generated responses and historical customer data at their fingertips, which cuts resolution times, improves accuracy, and fuels a positive customer relationship.
Think you need to hire more human agents to handle rapid growth or seasonal spikes in demand? Not necessarily. Of course, AI solutions can automate routine tasks and lighten the load for your customer service agents. However, these tools can also forecast demand, create accurate schedules, and distribute workloads. This means support teams can scale efficiently while keeping costs in check.
Looking for some inspiration to help you go beyond routine inquiries and repetitive tasks and step into the future of AI for the customer service experience? Here’s a look at how these 10 different companies have used Assembled’s AI features to streamline their customer service operations while still delivering fast, helpful, personalized experiences to customers.
Customer service solution, Intercom, has teams spread across Chicago, Sydney, and Dublin. It wasn’t just the team that was dispersed — the operations were too. Managed with a patchwork of disparate tools, the team struggled with inefficiencies in scheduling, resource allocation, and real-time visibility.
While Intercom relied on Fin AI, the company’s own AI agent, to manage simpler customer queries, the team recognized they needed some internal help too. Human agents were left to handle the more complex customer issues, which made effective forecasting and scheduling trickier.
Intercom selected Assembled for smarter workforce management. Integrating directly with Intercom’s existing tech stack, Assembled can create streamlined schedules, ensure automatic updates during vacation or sick time, and make real-time scheduling adjustments. Today, over 90% of Intercom’s workforce management processes are managed within Assembled and Intercom has reduced scheduling time by five hours per week.
Any call center recognizes the importance of efficient and effective call routing — and it’s another area where AI can be a huge help. Take workOS, monday.com, as an example.
Using Assembled’s API, the company built a proprietary routing tool called Zendesk Round Robin (ZDRR), which connects to the team’s Zendesk instance and monday.com boards. This can automatically prioritize and route customer inquiries to the best-fit agent. While that might sound basic, you’d be surprised by just how intelligent and nuanced the real-world application is.
The ZDRR tool reads for productive events, evaluating the event type and end-of-shift time so agents aren’t getting tickets 15 minutes before shift ends, during lunch, or 30 minutes before the end of their workdays. It also shuffles tickets periodically when agents go offline to ensure they don’t get lost in any individual queue.
It means lower wait times, more helpful answers to customer questions, and a better experience for customers and agents.
As crowdfunding and fundraising platform, GoFundMe, grew, so did the support team. There were more time zones, more specializations, more channels, and more offices. But the team knew that a bigger operation couldn’t translate to longer response times — issues with campaigns needed to be handled quickly.
The company needed team members available for customer needs but also wanted to prioritize team development. Recognizing that was too complex to manage with jumbled spreadsheets and basic scheduling software, GoFundMe turned to Assembled to balance prompt service with professional development.
Now, with Assembled’s Zendesk integration, GoFundMe generates sophisticated forecasts that regularly achieve within 10% weekly accuracy. GoFundMe also uses Assembled’s sophisticated scheduling algorithms to generate schedules that balance their email and chat needs alongside project time and meetings for the team. The team creates a more accurate schedule in far less time, saving an estimated two hours per day on scheduling.
Thrasio is an e-commerce giant, with about 190 unique brands and more than 70,000 customer interactions per month. And, while things were going well with an 87% customer satisfaction (CSAT) score, the team knew they were capable of more — provided they had the right technology partner.
Thrasio adopted Assembled and immediately pushed over 420,000 customer tickets to Assembled Assist’s machine learning and deep learning engine to process six months' worth of interactions. The team also set up Assembled Assist to handle the intricacies of all of the different companies’ brands, with unique rules, processes, voices, and product details.
With that groundwork, Assembled Assist can immediately provide agents with brand-specific replies and related knowledge base articles. It made a huge impact, helping Thrasio achieve a 97% CSAT, response times slashed to a minute, full resolutions within just 12 minutes, and $1.8 million in cost savings.
Fashion resale marketplace, Poshmark, started with an entirely in-house and co-located support team. But, as the company grew, shifted to remote work, and brought in outsourced agents, the team knew they needed to improve their processes.
Poshmark opted for Assembled to manage BPO operations and stay on top of metrics like utilization rate, adherence rate, shrinkage, productivity, time to first response, and time to resolution. The company also uses staffing heat maps and timelines to get a big-picture understanding of how the team is meeting customer demand every week.
It led to major improvements for both the outsourced and in-house teams, with a 10% year-over-year improvement in first response times and a 15% increase in team productivity thanks to insights from Assembled.
As a creator of performance running gear and experiences, Brooks knows the importance of moving quickly. Yet disjointed systems and a lack of visibility kept the customer experience team from achieving peak efficiency.
Brooks implemented Assembled to help leaders make in-the-moment modifications for the support team, like tailoring focus hours for specific channels or keeping a close eye on agent adherence in real time. Assembled’s forecasting tools and arrival pattern insights have also helped the team understand business trends, make data-driven decisions, and keep service levels in check.
The results have been impressive, reducing average phone wait times by a whopping 66%. Agents benefit too, with more time to take breaks and recharge — while still maintaining adequate staffing levels.
It makes sense that a garment brand like Honeylove would be focused on top-notch support. However, the team was struggling with escalations slowing things down. Waiting for help from a team lead was a major bottleneck for agents — one they knew AI could solve.
Honeylove partnered with Assembled to develop a tailored version of Assembled Assist focused on helping agents answer questions they would have otherwise escalated to team leads. The result was a system fine-tuned to Honeylove that knew about garment sizing, upcoming sales, and the intricacies of Honeylove’s return policy that could provide accurate, auto-drafted replies for agents.
This reduced ticket escalations by an impressive 20%. Additionally, power users were able to increase their solves per hour by 54% after just five months of using Assembled Assist.
Home decor company, Lulu and Georgia, had tried AI tools before — primarily using AI to instantly analyze content, context, and customer sentiment to route tickets to the right agent. However, the team was constantly disappointed in the results, with a lot of missed tickets and misinterpreted customer intent. Lulu and Georgia wanted a new solution that could improve case routing and also offer agent assistance and full AI automation.
The team’s top priority was streamlining the damaged item process. Without AI, this process involved numerous manual steps: requesting photos from the customer, filing claims with suppliers, arranging refunds or replacements, offering discounts, and more. Agents often had to do that all while simultaneously sympathizing with an upset customer.
With Assembled Assist, the team automated several steps of the process, pushing tickets through the system faster and giving human customer service agents more time to focus on empathizing with and supporting customers. Today, Assist has expanded beyond the damaged item process to play a central role in all of Lulu and Georgia’s support operations.
Tithely makes it easy for churches to accept donations online, with a mobile app, or through text. With a fully remote customer support team and no centralized system, Tithely was struggling to ensure alignment on tasks and schedules.
Tithley implemented Assembled to create a more structured and efficient support operation. Recognizing the opportunity to do even more, the team also adopted Assembled Assist to empower agents with AI-driven insights and automated workflows.
The impact was undeniable. Tithely’s most productive agents saw an 11% improvement in average handle time for email and a 26% improvement for chat. Power users increased case solves by 23% for email and an impressive 205% for chat. These power users also became internal champions for efficiency, helping train other employees on best practices and transforming the way Tithely approached customer support.
Australian training management software provider, aXcelerate, is intensely focused on helping people learn and grow. So, when aXcelerate’s Board of Directors asked the support team to invest in AI, the team jumped at the chance to learn more about the technology.
The team first considered deflection tools but found they didn’t align with their human-first support philosophy, especially given the diverse range of customer inquiries. Instead, they prioritized metrics like reducing case resolution times and boosting customer engagement and satisfaction scores.
Having already achieved efficiency improvements with Assembled’s workforce management solutions, aXcelerate implemented Assembled Assist. The company achieved a 50% reduction in training time for new support agents, enabling them to become proficient more quickly. These efficiency gains also allowed aXcelerate to expand its talent pool, as the streamlined training process made it easier to onboard agents from diverse backgrounds.
The above real-world examples show there’s no shortage of ways to implement AI for customer service. As you explore how to use this technology on your own support team, here are a few best practices to keep in mind:
For many people, AI is synonymous with ChatGPT. But AI in customer service is no longer about just simple chat automation — it’s about transforming your support operations in ways that benefit your team and your customers.
As these real-world examples show, AI can help teams reduce wait times, boost agent productivity, and improve customer satisfaction without sacrificing your customer experience. These companies didn’t just adopt AI. They implemented the right AI solutions to optimize workflows, empower agents, and achieve the ultimate goal: scaling efficiently.
Your key to experiencing similar AI-driven success starts here. Request a demo to see how Assembled Assist can transform your customer service operations.
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