How Elegant Comfort Eliminated 55 Hours of Weekly Phone Calls

Something that usually took us about 37 hours to 55 hours of phone calls a week. We eliminated that totally and now we just take care of emails within an hour a day. So my name is Burkai Earl. I am one of the owners of Elegant Comfort. We consist of three brothers and one dad. Our business started off with that living room and then we kind of grew it and now we operate at over 140,000 square feet, which is approximately three or four football fields big in terms of just home goods and bedding. So we are one of the largest bedding manufacturers and sellers for e-commerce within the U.S.

We do sell more than 3 million units a year and, you know, we are currently selling with Amazon, Walmart, Macy's, JCPenney and almost every other big retailer. So we are definitely one of the top five to top ten e-commerce bedding manufacturers out there in the U.S. We were definitely entertaining AI for customer support for almost six months now. With Frontdesk AI, it was very user-friendly and the AI voice itself was a lot more human-like, where I actually still have a couple people talking to it like it is a human. So I had to add in, this is a human AI auto-receptionist in the beginning,

because I had people talking like it was a human AI, telling its problems. I'm talking about like actual personal problems to it and it was just coping to it like a therapist and it was funny. The peak season, which is usually Q4 for us between September and Christmas time around New Year's, you know, there's always some type of lag and some type of issue that's always going on within our facility. So it kind of eliminated the fact that someone had to be at the phone eight hours a day. We were always within here because we also have a warehouse setting. A driver's coming in or someone else coming or there's an issue with something else that something needs to be attained to

that our customer service agent was getting out of their desk. So now instead of that, that's being responded pretty quickly. Something that usually took us about 37 hours to 55 hours of phone calls a week. We eliminated that totally in an hour, just take care of emails within an hour a day. If sometimes you need extra support or a customer calls in without an order number, it will create the ticket automatically or it will send them a text message and they'll be able to send pictures to the email that we request from them. Instead of them, you know, calling in saying, okay, I'm going to get that to you. It just kind of eliminates the extra back and forth between the customer and the customer support.

And then depending on the customer and the issue, whatever it may be, they're able to just get back and the correct person is able to call them back instead of getting transferred back and forth with other people within the office. 90% of our problems is where's my item? Or they're asking for tracking information or it is between we may have received a misshipment or anything else. Or sometimes they ask for like a second product to buy from us, like similar to what they received. So when a customer reaches out, they're able to get the response that they're looking for right away, create the ticket right away, and then the replacement gets shipped to them within 24 hours.

Something that I really like is, you know, before we had to limit and constrain ourselves, where the customer had to call in between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. because that was our working hours. The biggest problem with that and the best benefit to that for us was, you know, 9 to 5, yeah, we are all working. But our customers are also working and they're not able to call within 9 to 5, within work. Are they going to call us during their coffee break, lunch break? You know, when we have now the AI answering our phone calls past 5 p.m. where they're able to create the ticket, ease of mind, and then they're able to follow it up with an email

or whatever needs to get done at their workday. So it's kind of a lot faster for them too because now they don't have to wait until the next day to call and try to make time to return a $30 to $50 goods that they purchased from us. One thing that we did set up was for our wholesale accounts. In the case that we have someone that wants to buy wholesale from us, we create a completely different transfer call option where it will create the ticket and send it to the person that's dealing with our wholesale side immediately.

So it bypasses our customer service. Whereas before they would call customer service, then they would have to loop in the correct person. Now they get connected to them immediately, which is kind of great. If you think about it, if someone's trying to buy something for their Airbnb or for their hotel or for motel, whatever it may be, you really do have about three days or two business to three business days to close that lead or else they're going to buy it from another bulk option online. Originally, we did a little soft launch. So we were able to kind of test out how it was doing it. I had each person from our office, warehouse, friends, family calling in about 50 to 100 phone calls

to see how it was going to do for different cases, different scenarios. It needed a little bit of tweaking. But now that after like about a week of tweaking it, the AI is kind of still adapting and it's still getting better. Our skepticism was, is it going to be able to give the same human-like responses? And is our customers going to be happy? And I haven't seen any issues so far, which is pretty great. I've already recommended Frontdesk to a couple of my friends that own businesses. It really does make life simpler. Normally a person that's dealing with phone calls, they're also not dealing with phone calls. Just that.

They also have a lot of other work that needs to get done because there could be a day where you don't get phone calls. There could be a day where you are getting phone calls. At least for our company. With that being said, it allowed us to kind of shift the focus and shift the heavy weight to being able to be more productive. So I definitely would recommend Front Desk to a lot of other companies.