Mike HeapMike is an experienced Product Manager who focuses on all the “non-development” areas of My AskAI, from finance and customer success to product design, copywriting, testing and more.
Table of Contents
- What does GiveCard do?
- Which helpdesk does GiveCard use?
- How did GiveCard train their AI customer service agent?
- When did GiveCard decide to turn on 'direct replies' to customers?
- What was the biggest thing GiveCard did to improve their AI agent's resolution?
- How do GiveCard customize their AI agent setup to work for their business?
- Keeping replies clear and on-brand
- Asking the right question before answering
- What impact is GiveCard's AI customer service agent having now?
- Where do GiveCard go from here?
Created time
Jun 3, 2026 01:53 PM
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Ecomm?
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Publish date
Jun 3, 2026
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my-askai-givecard-case-study
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Case study
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GiveCard resolves around 95% of its Zendesk tickets each month at 90% AI CSAT saving the team roughly 20 hours every month.
GiveCard moves money to people who need it, fast. So the questions landing in their inbox carry weight: a card that won't work, a balance that looks wrong, a payment that hasn't arrived. The people asking are often in a tight spot, and the team answering them is small.
After a burst of growth, that volume started to outrun what a handful of people could keep up with by hand. Instead of hiring their way out, GiveCard put our AI agent at the front of their Zendesk inbox. It now resolves about 95% of incoming tickets at 90% CSAT, and it got there with no help center connector and no order-data feed behind it.
Here's how it came together.
What does GiveCard do?
GiveCard calls itself "the simplest way to disburse funds at scale." They issue prepaid cards and run bank transfers so that governments, nonprofits, businesses and social-service agencies can get money to the people they serve. Those people are often the ones the banking system forgets: disaster survivors, research participants, benefit-program recipients.
The reach is bigger than you'd guess for a young company. GiveCard has issued hundreds of thousands of cards, works with 100+ government agencies, and runs in every US state.
Which helpdesk does GiveCard use?
GiveCard runs support on Zendesk. As they scaled, they pulled their email support onto Zendesk, and that general inbox is where our agent now sits, working as a flat layer at the front of every ticket and clearing the routine questions before a human ever opens them.
The fit is a practical one. Most of GiveCard's contact comes in by email and phone, because their cardholders aren't living in a chat widget. Put our agent at the front of the email queue and the everyday questions get an instant answer, which leaves the team free for the cases that need a person.
How did GiveCard train their AI customer service agent?
This is where GiveCard's setup goes off the usual script. Most teams start by plugging in an existing help center and letting the AI answer from those articles. GiveCard didn't have a deep public help center to lean on, so the agent had to be taught from scratch.
The training came down to three things:
- Uploaded files. They fed the agent their internal docs: how each program works, what cardholders can and can't do, the policy behind every kind of card and transfer.
- A library of Custom Answers. For the questions where the wording has to be exact (eligibility, balances, what a card can be used for), they wrote Custom Answers so the agent gives the precise, approved reply every time. It's the boring-but-effective option, and on money questions boring is exactly what you want.
- Self-Learning. Whenever a human answered something the AI couldn't, our Self-Learning feature drafted that answer into reusable knowledge, so the agent resolved the next identical question on its own.
None of this needed a pre-built knowledge base. GiveCard built the agent's knowledge from the ground up, and Self-Learning kept extending it on its own.
When did GiveCard decide to turn on 'direct replies' to customers?
Our agent replies directly to cardholders inside Zendesk, screening the routine email before a human sees it. The 90% CSAT sitting next to the 95% resolution rate is the tell that those replies are landing: customers are getting answered, and they're rating the answers well.
For a team handling money for vulnerable people, that's a real act of trust. It means our agent is the first voice a cardholder hears, on the questions where a wrong answer would sting.
What was the biggest thing GiveCard did to improve their AI agent's resolution?
Self-Learning is the engine behind the 95%.
Because GiveCard started with no help center to connect, the agent's knowledge had to be built up over time. The loop is a simple one: a customer asks something the agent can't yet answer, a human replies, and our Self-Learning feature turns that reply into a drafted article. Next time the same question shows up, the agent handles it alone.
That compounding adds up fast. Those auto-drafted articles have already powered over 300 ticket responses for GiveCard (fun fact: that's knowledge that didn't exist the day the agent went live, all written off the back of real conversations). Around it, the Custom Answers library keeps the money-and-eligibility wording exact.
Put together, that's how a knowledge-led setup with no connected help center still cleared 95%. For context, that sits well above the roughly 70% median resolution rate we see across the field of AI support deployments. I've been on enough rollout calls to know how rare a number like that is on a setup this lean.
How do GiveCard customize their AI agent setup to work for their business?
The agent feels like GiveCard's own, and that comes down to how they've tuned it with Guidance.
Keeping replies clear and on-brand
They use Communication Guidance to control how the agent talks (and getting that tone right matters when the subject is someone's money). A lot of their cardholders are unbanked or underbanked, and many are reaching out under stress, so replies have to be plain, calm and jargon-free. The Guidance rules hold that tone steady, which counts for a lot.
Asking the right question before answering
The trickier problem is that the same question can have different answers depending on the program a cardholder is on. Whether a card works at an ATM, say, depends on that program's rules. They use Context & Clarification Guidance so the agent gathers the right details before it answers, instead of guessing and getting it wrong (which is a big part of why the resolution rate holds up across so many programs).
What impact is GiveCard's AI customer service agent having now?
The scores on the doors, last 30 days:
- 95% AI resolution rate, well above the ~70% field median for AI support.
- ~20 hours saved per month
- 90% AI CSAT across AI-handled tickets.
- 300+ ticket responses powered by knowledge Self-Learning drafted on its own.
It’s allowing GiveCard to run support with 1 support agent for every 30,000 cardholders, that's real leverage. GiveCard promises round-the-clock human support, and our agent is how a team that size keeps that promise: it soaks up the routine volume so the humans stay on the cases that need them, and nobody has to hire ahead of the growth.
Where do GiveCard go from here?
GiveCard's roadmap is mostly about reaching the questions the agent can't yet resolve on its own, the ones that need live data.
The clearest next step is connecting our User Data API so the agent can look up a cardholder's account and recent transactions. Transaction questions (a declined card, a charge that looks wrong) are GiveCard's single most common ticket type, and right now they still need a human to pull up the card ID and check.
Give the agent secure access to that data and a big slice of those tickets becomes self-serve too. From there, Tasks would let the agent act rather than only answer: activating or replacing a card, checking a balance.
They're also exploring a multi-agent setup, using Zendesk's routing to give different programs their own tailored agent. And Handover & Escalation Guidance (the one Guidance type they haven't switched on yet) is a natural next addition as the agent takes on more sensitive cases.
If you'd like to see more customer stories like GiveCard's, browse all of our case studies, or take a look at our pricing to get started.
