Case study · E-commerce Brand
$120K saved annually by automating customer support
A fast-growing DTC apparel brand was buried under 12,000+ support tickets a month across email, chat and social DMs. Thinkly built a Shopify-connected AI chatbot and an internal escalation workflow that now resolves 80% of tickets without a human — saving $120K a year in outsourced support fees.
The problem
As the brand scaled past $10M ARR, its outsourced support agency became the largest line item after inventory — burning ~$180K/year while median first-response time crept above 14 hours.
80% of tickets were the same five questions: where is my order, how do I return, what size should I buy, do you ship to X, is Y back in stock.
Agents were manually copy-pasting tracking numbers from Shopify into Gorgias and reshipping labels one at a time.
What we built
Thinkly built a custom AI chatbot trained on the brand's product catalog, size guide, shipping matrix and returns policy, deployed on the website, Instagram, WhatsApp and email — with a single shared context so a customer can start on IG and finish on email seamlessly.
The chatbot is wired directly to Shopify, ShipStation and Loop Returns via server-side workflows: order lookups, tracking updates, return-label generation and exchange creation happen inside the conversation, not in a separate portal.
A confidence-based escalation model routes any query the AI is <90% sure about to a human agent with full conversation context pre-loaded — so humans only see the hard 20%.
A weekly quality-review dashboard surfaces the top 20 lowest-confidence conversations so the team can retrain prompts and knowledge base without engineering support.
The results
- 80% of tickets are now resolved end-to-end by the AI, with a customer-satisfaction score of 4.6/5 on those conversations.
- Median first-response time fell from 14 hours to under 90 seconds (a 90%+ reduction).
- Outsourced support spend dropped from $180K/year to $60K/year — a net $120K annual saving after Thinkly's implementation and hosting costs.
- The internal team reclaimed ~4,000 hours per year previously spent on tier-1 tickets and redeployed them to VIP retention and social engagement.
Services delivered
- AI Chatbot
- Shopify & Helpdesk Integration
- Workflow Automation
“Our AI chatbot handles 80% of customer queries instantly. Returns, orders, tracking — all automated.”