About Trove Brands 

Trove Brands is a multi-brand company home to some of the fastest-growing brands in the hydration, fitness, and lifestyle markets, including BlenderBottle, Owala, and Whiskware. They’ve transformed household essentials like water bottles into viral sensations with buzzworthy product drops that build hype, bringing in a flurry of rapid orders and an influx of customer inquiries. 

“AI Agent and Actions have been a game changer because they’re taking care of customers faster and with the same level of care as our own team.” 

—Jon Clare, VP of Customer Service at Trove Brands

The Challenge: Managing urgent order cancellation requests across multiple viral brands

Trove Brands’ customer service team had a big task: manually processing thousands of incoming customer inquiries every single day. One of the biggest challenges was order cancellation requests, especially after exclusive product drops. 

These requests could come in on a Sunday, in the middle of the night, or buried alongside hundreds of other time-sensitive requests — as a result, order cancellation requests were often missed and the orders mistakenly sent out.  

Each of these misshipments came at a great cost. Since the customer attempted to cancel within the appropriate timeframe, Trove would send another item, cover the cost of shipping, lose the initial inventory, and risk disappointing the customer due to an imperfect experience. 

Even when agents caught these requests in time, the manual work made order cancellations a challenge for the 20-person team. Agents had to reference Shopify as well as their fulfillment software to validate that a cancellation request met their policy criteria before processing.  

Trove Brands needed an efficient way to manage order cancellations to ensure no tickets were missed, misshipments were avoided, and customers received quick resolutions.

The Solution: Implementing AI Agent for humanlike automation and resolutions  

Trove Brands transitioned from manually processing order cancellations to adding an AI Agent named Wally, to the team. Wally handles repetitive tasks 24/7 for Trove, like answering questions about return and exchange policies or even completely processing cancellations within Shopify. 

“The difference with Gorgias’s AI Agent compared to other tools we’ve tried is that it’s actually conversational. It learns our brand voice and makes it feel like you’re truly interacting with a human.” 

—Jon Clare, VP of Customer Service at Trove Brands 

Enabling real-time order cancellations with Actions

Trove Brands enabled an AI Agent Action, which allows it to cancel orders entirely within Shopify. Wally reliably validates the customer’s return eligibility in seconds, looking at fulfillment status and time since the order was placed, which was a time-consuming task for agents to perform manually. 

“The Actions for order cancellations has improved two key things. It responds to tickets within about 30 seconds and it is available 24/7. Regardless of when a customer places their order, the likelihood of quickly catching and canceling the order has increased by 70% since we started using Actions. It’s an exceptional result.”

—Jon Clare, VP of Customer Service at Trove Brands

Here’s an example of AI Agent in action cancelling a customer order in a friendly, conversational way:

Enhancing the agent experience and growth opportunities

Clare is committed to building a people-centric culture within Trove’s in-house support team. He understands that helping employees avoid burnout and maintain their positive energy is one of the best ways  to build genuine human connections with customers that foster satisfaction and loyalty. 

Implementing Actions has significantly improved the day-to-day lives of Trove Brands’ agents by freeing up their time to focus on more complex and meaningful responsibilities. This shift has allowed the creation of a dedicated internal AI task force that closely monitors and continuously optimizes the performance of their AI Agent, Wally. 

“It’s given us the space to allow our team to develop higher skill sets and thought processes. They're taking on more intensive process building, process improvement, ideation, and innovation because they have the capacity. They know what our customers need, and have the time to build it.” 

—Jon Clare, VP of Customer Service at Trove Brands

Actions also played an important role during limited product drops. Customers tend to impulse buy during these drops, oftentimes leading to an influx in order cancellation requests. AI Agent is able to handle these requests—reducing burnout and the need to bring on temporary support during peak seasons like BFCM. 

The Results: CX improvements in response time, resolution time, and order cancellation success rate

AI Agent and Actions transformed Trove Brands’ CX game across the board, helping drive results like:

• 45% automation rate
• $23K labor costs avoided in 1 month
• 70% reduction in failed order cancellation requests 
• 25s response time and 31s resolution time for AI Agent

Trove Brands saw some of the biggest improvements during the busiest time of the year. During BFCM 2024 compared to BFCM 2023, AI Agent Actions helped Trove Brands achieve:

• 99.93% increase in first response times, from 11 hours and 30 minutes to 30 seconds
• 91.43% increase in resolution time, from 17 hours and 30 minutes to 1 hour and 30 minutes

“When shoppers leave a satisfaction rating or review about their interaction with Wally, they comment as if Wally is an individual,” Clare tells us. “They say things like, ‘Wally was so helpful,’ or ‘Thanks, Wally! I appreciate that.’ That tells me that it’s working the way I want it to.” 

Looking forward: Expanding AI Agent’s impact with more channels and Actions

Trove Brands is excited to expand the impact of AI Agent even further by introducing additional actions. Aside from order cancellations, warranty claims make up many of Trove Brands’ incoming customer tickets. The team is gearing up to work with the Gorgias team to implement an Action to support customers’ warranty claims—with the same level of accuracy and speed as order cancellations. 

Learn more about AI Agent Actions to save your team time, address urgent customer inquiries, and boost customer satisfaction.