How YouGarden achieves 66% AI resolution, saving 965 hrs each month

YouGarden had a problem: they were coming up to their renewal with their existing AI agent provider, but they hadn't made the progress they wanted in terms of automation and resolution rates and were reaching the limits of the capabilities of off-the-shelf features.

So they turned to My AskAI.

Since integrating their My AskAI customer service agent into their Freshdesk helpdesk it has resolved over 7,700 support tickets and is currently resolving 66% of their tickets and saving their team 965 hours every month.

Now you’re probably asking yourself: “how does YouGarden do this?!” and “how can I do this for my business?”.

Let’s take you through their setup and show you how.

My AskAI has fundamentally changed how we support our customers.

The quality and consistency of responses are extremely high, and it’s allowed us to scale support without compromising the experience we’re known for at YouGarden.

Mamunur Rahman, Head of Customer Service, YouGarden.

YouGarden AI customer service results on Freshdesk at a glance

What does YouGarden do?

Let’s start by explaining a little bit about YouGarden

YouGarden is a UK-based online garden center (eCommerce) that sells plants, bulbs, trees and other gardening products through its website and delivers them to customers’ homes.

Their goal is to make gardening accessible for everyone with a wide range of helpful videos and plant care tips.

It has hundreds of thousands of customers and over ~103,000 reviews on Trustpilot (averaging an impressive 4.3!).

Their strength lies in their wide range of plants delivered well-packaged and ready to grow, often with good value prices and a membership discount club

This makes gardening easier and more affordable for green-thumbed enthusiasts across the UK.

Which helpdesk does YouGarden use?

YouGarden uses Freshdesk as their helpdesk platform, receiving the majority of their support requests via email to their different brands, with some additional ticket volume coming from calls. Our AI agent for Freshdesk works inside that same inbox.

They previously used Digital Genius for their AI responses, but found the pace of progress with the tool starting to stagnate, prompting them to look elsewhere.

After a short tender process and speaking with various competitors (including Freshdesk’s own Freddy AI and Intercom Fin), YouGarden chose to work with My AskAI due to our competitive pricing, deep integration with Freshdesk via our approved app and our flexibility to work on custom feature development with them.

How did they train their AI customer service agent?

YouGarden had a Freshdesk help center already, so they connected this to their AI agent using our Freshdesk connector to get things going.

But they also had a lot of useful training data (tutorials, blog posts, terms and conditions) on their sites too (over 3,000 pages of it in fact across their main site, the RHS’s site and plant care guide sites) that they didn’t want to go to waste.

So they added this to their AI agent’s knowledge as well using our unlimited website sync to ensure that the content always remains fresh and their AI agent was as knowledgeable as could be.

That gave their AI agent a solid grounding using “static” information, but the real unlock was being able to access their back-end database and order information to give customers updates on recent purchases, along with tracking links.

But YouGarden had limited development resources at the time of implementation so weren’t able to build the necessary APIs themselves.

So My AskAI stepped in and worked with their 3rd party site builder, AMO to build a User Data API on their behalf that would feed their AI agent with all the necessary information required to provide truly personalized responses.

When did they decide to turn on ‘direct replies’ to customers?

After a month of using their AI agent in “Notes” mode to sense-check and QA the AI agent’s answers, they then decided the fastest way for them to learn how their new agent would perform would be to put it in front of their users and start gathering feedback.

In the worst case scenario, they knew there were always lots of ways the users could request to speak to someone and hopefully in the majority of cases it would give users faster answers.

They were pleasantly surprised to see that from go-live, due to their extensive collection of articles, and integrated APIs, they were able to see a ~60% resolution rate.

What was the biggest thing they did to improve their AI agent’s resolution?

The most impactful update YouGarden made to their AI agent was to give it access to their live customer data through our User Data API.

This meant when replying to their customers it knew everything about their:

• Recent order
• Previous purchases
• Tracking details
• Delivery details

And more.

This took it from being a “knowledge-based bot” to a true customer service agent.

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On top of this, Mamunur and his team regularly review their Insights, Knowledge Gaps and use the Inspect tool to understand where their AI agent could be improved, resulting in the addition of several custom answers being added.

Through this continual improvement process and the API integrations, they took their AI resolution from the ~60% they saw at go-live to a peak of around 82%. That peak is well clear of the 70% median we see across the AI support deployments we've rated.

How do they customize their AI agent setup to work for their business?

Every business manages support in their own way and has nuances to their setup, that’s why our AI agent has multiple customization options to fit around you.

For YouGarden, this came in the form of:

• Using our different types of guidance to ensure their AI customer service agent responded on-brand, using the structure of responses and sign-offs they wanted and asking clarifying questions when required.
• Choosing for the AI to reply only to the first message received, so their human team can handle any follow ups.
• Using our Freshdesk AI tagging solution to improve the consistency of their ticket reporting and choose which types of ticket they want their AI agent to reply to.

What impressed us most was how accurately the AI reflects our tone, policies, and product knowledge. The responses feel genuinely helpful rather than generic, which is critical in a sector like horticulture where advice really matters

Mamunur Rahman, Head of Customer Service, YouGarden.

What impact is their AI customer service agent having now?

YouGarden saw the impact of moving to My AskAI almost immediately:

Generally, the responses are much better than Digital Genius’ and more detailed.

Mamunur Rahman, Head of Customer Service, YouGarden

As a result of YouGarden’s continual efforts to improve their AI customer service agent knowledge, their AI agent is currently:

• Resolving 66% of tickets automatically each month across almost 12,000 tickets (that’s around 7,800 tickets per month their team doesn’t have to deal with directly).
• Saving their customer service team 965 hours per month (assuming a 5 minute per ticket handle time).
• All the while achieving a 78% AI CSAT score across those 11,785 tickets.

Where do they go from here?

YouGarden are already looking to the future and to see how far they can take their AI customer service.

They are going to be starting to roll out Tasks very soon that will allow full automation of processes like returns, refunds and address changes.

On top of that the next big channel to address will be AI voice (watch this space!).

For any high-volume ecommerce business looking to improve response times, consistency, and insight, I’d strongly recommend MyAskAI. It’s been a valuable addition to our customer service toolkit

Mamunur Rahman, Head of Customer Service, YouGarden

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Learn more about building an AI-first support team, the org pattern behind results like these.