How Caitlyn Minimalist Increased One-Touch Tickets by 300% and Reached a 25% Conversion Rate with AI Agent for Support and Sales

Challenge: As a personalized jewelry brand, shoppers turn to Caitlyn Minimalist for special gifts that often require a little extra communication with the brand to make sure they get it just right. With that comes an increase in tickets for the team to manage, reaching 30,000+ each month. 

Solution: Introducing AI Agent for support and sales helped Caitlyn Minimalist provide personalized responses to repetitive WISMO tickets while simultaneously offering tailored product recommendations. AI Agent personalizes each conversation by pulling information from the website and customer profiles, leading to faster resolutions and more sales.

About Caitlyn Minimalist 

Caitlyn Minimalist is a leading jewelry brand loved for its customizable, handcrafted designs. Since launching on Etsy in 2014, Caitlyn Minimalist has been a go-to destination for sentimental gifts. After becoming one of Etsy’s top sellers, the brand opened a Shopify store to expand its online presence. 

With a vast product catalog with many customization options, Caitlyn Minimalist needed a way to efficiently deliver exceptional customer experience at scale as demand grew. The team wanted to automate repetitive tickets and offer tailored sales assistance with the same empathetic approach customers loved. 

The challenge: Maintaining customer empathy with a growing ticket backlog 

In 2020, Caitlyn Minimalist experienced a surge in demand driven by a few viral moments, including a Buzzfeed feature and a user-generated TikTok video with over 7 million views. As the customer support team expanded to handle the higher order and ticket volumes, they worked to balance training several new team members with managing the growing inbox. 

“2020 was a customer service nightmare for us. We would open the computer every morning to 2,500 new emails. We would try to fight our inbox, but customers would email again, even angrier, before we could reply to their first email.”

—Michael Holcombe, Co-owner and Director of Operations at Caitlyn Minimalist 

Since Caitlyn Minimalist sells customized jewelry, its production and delivery times are longer than brands with ready-to-sell products. Customers often purchase the products as gifts for birthdays, holidays, weddings, anniversaries, graduations, and more. 

The longer lead times and special intention behind each order mean customers follow up on their order status more frequently than other jewelry brands. They want reassurance that the gift will look perfect and arrive in time for the special occasion.

These regular WISMO tickets took up much of the support team’s bandwidth. The team needed to maintain high customer satisfaction despite production or shipping delays during the holidays through prompt, empathetic responses. 

As ticket volumes reached 30,000 per month, Caitlyn Minimalist needed a tool that would:

• Automate repetitive inquiries to let them focus on high-impact conversations that need a human touch, like lost or broken items
• Work across channels as the distribution of tickets varied. In Q4 2023, 90% of tickets were from email, and less than 1% were on chat. In Q4 2024, that shifted to 60% via email and 20% on chat. 
• Help customers find the right product without having to navigate through the entire website

The solution: One AI Agent with two skill sets—support and sales

Caitlyn Minimalist introduced Gorgias’s AI Agent to support its team in two key ways:

1. Automating repetitive support tickets
2. Offering virtual shopping assistance

AI Agent for Support offers faster responses that reassure customers 

Caitlyn Minimalist onboarded AI Agent to its support team to help tackle the growing ticket volume and give agents some breathing room. 

"AI allows us to focus on higher-impact tasks—like helping customers with lost or broken items—while it takes care of repetitive questions like status updates."

—Gabi, Customer Service Lead at Caitlyn Minimalist

Gorgias’s seamless integration with Shopify allows AI Agent to use customer information like order history to provide personalized support. 

For example, if a customer asks for an order update, AI Agent pulls information like the customer’s order date, purchase details, and shipping policies to provide a detailed, accurate response. 

Caitlyn Minimalist values its empathetic customer experience, and AI Agent delivers that. The team has created Guidance documents and a custom tone of voice to ensure AI Agent addresses the customer’s concern immediately, reassures them, and provides friendly and helpful support. ‍

‍"Getting that first message in, even if it doesn’t fully resolve the issue, reassures customers that someone is on the way to help."

—Anthony Ponce, Head of Customer Experience at Caitlyn Minimalist

AI Agent for Sales gives personalized pre-sales guidance that converts

Caitlyn Minimalist was eager to start using AI Agent to help drive sales and was immediately impressed by its ability to pull information from across the website, product descriptions, and customer data. With this, AI Agent for Sales provides hyper-personalized virtual shopping assistance. 

For example, a customer looking for a birthday gift idea can ask AI Agent for recommendations. After a couple of pre-sales discovery questions, like jewelry type, color, and budget preferences, AI Agent recommends products that the shopper can add directly to their cart. 

AI Agent for Sales has also helped customers navigate the website and find the right products by asking discovery questions that guide shoppers to a product that meets their preferences. ‍

‍"Customers interact with the Sales AI like they would a customer service rep—it’s a two-way conversation where they answer questions and get personalized product recommendations."

—Gabi, Customer Service Lead at Caitlyn Minimalist

Implementing AI Agent with customer empathy in mind 

Caitlyn Minimalist introduced AI Agent in multiple phases, first enabling it for email support and then gradually expanding to live chat, and eventually AI Agent for Sales. 

The team worked with Gorgias to create custom Guidance documents that outline how AI Agent should handle certain situations and when to hand over specific topics. 

For example, they’ve created a Guidance for when a shopper confirms their jewelry personalization details: 

The team constantly reviews how AI Agent uses these Guidance documents and updates them for comprehensiveness. 

Since an empathic, personal touch is pivotal to Caitlyn Minimalist’s brand, they’re very intentional about what AI Agent handles and what’s reserved for human agents. Caitlyn Minimalist configured a custom tone of voice to ensure it responds to each customer as empathetically as a human would. 

“We've always based our customer service on a patient, empathetic point of view because we have a lot of people purchasing for important moments in their lives—weddings, deaths, graduations, and those sorts of things. People are gifting in response to big life moments, so we need AI Agent to really listen to our customer’s situation and support them.” 

—Michael Holcombe, Co-owner and Director of Operations at Caitlyn Minimalist 

The results: Quicker response times and higher conversion rates

Caitlyn Minimalist unlocked efficiency gains, customer experience improvements, and positive revenue impact from introducing AI Agent for support and sales. 

Especially during peak seasons like Black Friday Cyber Monday and the holidays. 

During Q4 2024 compared to Q3 2023, AI Agent helped Caitlyn Minimalist achieve:

• 99.37% decrease in first response time (from 1 hour and 1 minute to 23 seconds)
• 58.96% decrease in resolution time (from 3 hours and 20 seconds to 1 hour and 14 minutes) 
• 303.88% increase in one-touch tickets (from 4.89% to 19.73%)

On a broader scale, AI Agent also helped the support team with:

• Efficiency gains: Despite a 160% increase in tickets, the team managed inboxes without increasing headcount
• Multi-channel coverage: Introducing AI Agent on chat was pivotal as conversations shifted from email (previously 90% of all tickets) to a more balanced mix, with chat interactions increasing from 1% to 20%

AI Agent for Sales has also accomplished a 25% conversion rate, outperforming human agents by 150% (10% conversion rate).

Looking forward: AI-powered optimizations to the customer journey

As an early adopter of AI Agent, Caitlyn Minimalist is always looking for new ways to leverage automation to improve their customer experience. 

The team is eager to use insights from AI Agent for Sales to drive more conversions. For example, they plan to analyze data, such as where customers drop off during pre-sales conversations, to optimize product descriptions. 

On the support side, Caitlyn Minimalist plans to take advantage of AI Agent’s ability to read Shopify order tags to handle more complex customer corners. 

Learn more about how AI Agent can simultaneously improve support efficiency and conversion rates for your ecommerce business.