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All case studies Ecommerce

AI support triage & draft replies

A DTC apparel brand cut median first-response time from fourteen hours to ninety minutes — without adding headcount or losing the human in the loop.

Representative engagement — the figures below model a typical project of this kind, not a named-client audited result.

SectorDirect-to-consumer apparel
Scale~3,500 support tickets / month
Team5 support agents
Engagement~8 weeks, audit to handover
The challenge

An inbox that never caught up

Every ticket was triaged and answered by hand. Median first-response time sat around fourteen hours, and during seasonal spikes — when volume ran two to three times higher — it climbed past thirty.

Roughly 40% of agent time went to repetitive, low-complexity tickets — order status, returns policy, address changes — leaving less room for the cases that genuinely needed a person.

What we built

Classify, draft, and resolve the easy ones — keep agents on the rest

We built a triage pipeline that classifies each incoming ticket by intent and urgency, pulls order and shipping context from the commerce platform and 3PL, and drafts a reply for the agent to approve.

A defined set of low-risk cases is resolved automatically behind a confidence threshold and explicit guardrails. Everything else lands in an agent's queue, pre-drafted. Draft quality is tracked by an evaluation harness, and every override is logged.

  • Intent and urgency classification on every ticket
  • Order and shipping context pulled from commerce + 3PL systems
  • Agent-approved reply drafting with tone control
  • Guarded auto-resolution for low-risk ticket types
The figures

What changed, by the numbers.

~1.5 hrsMedian first response (was ~14 hrs)
~4 hrsPeak-season first response (was ~32 hrs)
~28%Tickets auto-resolved (low-risk only)
−45%Agent handle time per ticket

Median first response

Before
~14 hrs
After
~1.5 hrs

Peak first response

Before
~32 hrs
After
~4 hrs
The outcome

Faster answers, steadier tone, same team

First responses now land in about ninety minutes, and peak season no longer means a collapsing inbox. Agents handle more than twice the volume per day because they approve and adjust drafts instead of writing every reply from scratch — and the brand's tone stays consistent across the whole queue.

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