Have a few small (but growing) online stores as clients at work and I'm trying to figure out if automating support with AI workflows is a good call or if they need to hire another support rep.
Hiring isn't just salary, it's training time plus the weeks a new rep spends at maybe 60% speed before they're fully ramped.
Automation is platform fees divided by conversations handled, but that number lies on its own. It ignores volume (unit cost drops as usage grows) and quality (a bot that escalates constantly isn't cheap, it's just hiding the cost somewhere else).
I’m thinking that for clients still under a certain ticket volume, hiring wins just because there isn't enough repetitive volume yet to make automation pay off.
But automation is better when the ticket mix is repetitive enough that a rep would spend most of their day answering the same handful of questions, and when the store has enough order/shipping data flowing through that a bot can actually resolve things instead of just deflecting them.
What do you all think?
More on it here:
I get asked a lot what the best agentic customer support platform is for a growing business. It's a tough question to answer generically because it depends so much on what you need and how your team works.
I've noticed when people ask about an 'agentic customer support platform' they don't really know what's the norm or how it actually works, so let's start there.
Agentic just means the platform can take action, not only respond. A regular chatbot answers a question about your refund policy. An agentic one pulls up the order and issues the refund itself, no human needed. That distinction matters a lot once repetitive requests start eating your team's day.
What to prioritize changes as you grow:
-
Early stage: easy setup, a free or cheap tier to test without commitment
-
Scaling stage: the ability to take real action in your order or CRM system, not just explain things
-
Higher volume: pricing predictability and reporting depth, since per-resolution costs can climb fast
In terms of recommendations, Freshdesk is the easiest to get running with a genuinely usable free tier, though Freddy AI adds real cost once volume grows.
Zendesk brings solid reporting, but AI resolution is billed separately and takes longer to get comfortable with. Intercom's Fin resolves well, but per-resolution pricing gets harder to predict as you scale.
Tidio pairs live chat with an AI agent in one workspace, which works well for ecommerce teams, though it's less built for workflows outside retail.
What's pushing your team to look at agentic platforms instead of sticking with a standard chatbot?
Source:
About a month ago it came to my attention just how overwhelmed our support team has been. There was a huge number of tickets coming in each week and I started to worry it would lead to burnout. I did a check of our chat logs to see what was going on and why the volume was so high. Turns out roughly half our conversations covered the same 4-5 topics: order status, shipping timelines, payment issues or refunds.
PSA: Repetitive tickets hide inside your total volume until you separate them out by intent, and then the pattern is obvious.
Once we did that, the split looked something like this:
-
Rule-based bots cleared 30-45% of it on their own
-
AI agents that actually resolved instead of just deflecting got closer to 70%
-
Agents were left with the stuff that needed judgment, not repetition
How's your team drawing the line between what gets automated and what doesn't?
