From 18-Hour Response Times to 4 Minutes

The situation: 18-hour average response time and a drowning support team

Lumio, a direct-to-consumer e-commerce brand selling premium lighting products, had a support problem they could not solve by hiring. During peak periods, their two-person support team was fielding over 400 tickets a week. Average first response time had crept up to 18 hours. Customer satisfaction scores were declining. Refund requests were up 22% year on year — not because of product issues, but because customers could not get answers fast enough to make confident purchasing decisions.

They had tried hiring a third support agent. The cost was £38,000 per year and the response time only dropped to 12 hours — still far too slow for a brand competing on customer experience.

Deploying the Customer Support agent

Lumio deployed the AgentOps Customer Support agent over a single afternoon. Setup involved connecting Zendesk, uploading their product knowledge base and configuring escalation rules — specifically, any ticket involving a complaint, a refund request over £50 or an order marked lost in transit would be flagged immediately for human review.

Everything else was handled by the agent.

The agent was trained on Lumio’s tone of voice, product specifications, returns policy and most common ticket types. Within the first hour, it had successfully resolved 14 tickets without any human involvement.

The numbers after 60 days

Average first response time dropped from 18 hours to 4 minutes. The agent handled 76% of all incoming tickets automatically — order status queries, returns requests under £50, product compatibility questions, delivery tracking and installation guidance. Customer satisfaction score rose from 3.6 to 4.7 out of 5.

Refund requests dropped 31%. Not because the policy changed — because customers were getting answers in minutes instead of waiting a day and a half to find out if what they wanted to buy was compatible with their home.

What the human team does now

The two human support agents now handle only the tickets that genuinely require human judgment — complex complaints, escalations, edge cases and high-value customer conversations worth investing time in. They are less overwhelmed, more effective and able to give real attention to the situations that matter most.

The company did not cancel the third hire entirely. They redirected the budget to a customer success role — someone focused on proactive relationship-building rather than reactive ticket resolution. That is what AI agents make possible: not headcount reduction, but redeployment of human effort to higher-value work.

Is your support team in the same position?

If your average response time is above four hours, if your team is spending the majority of their day answering the same ten questions repeatedly, or if your customer satisfaction scores are suffering because of speed rather than quality — the Customer Support agent will make an immediate, measurable difference.