AI Product Deployment

How an E-Commerce Retailer Reduced Call Center Costs by 42% in 90 Days with AI Call Pro

Challenge

Unsustainable call center costs and poor customer experience during peak shopping periods

HomeNest Direct

$180M annual revenue, 650 employees, Austin, TX

Key Outcomes
VERIFIED
AI Containment Rate
71%
Cost Per Resolved Call↓42%
Projected Annual Savings$2.1M
Avg. Hold Time (from 47 min)4 min
CSAT on AI-Contained Calls4.1/5
Industry
E-Commerce / Retail

71%

AI Containment Rate

↓42%

Cost Per Resolved Call

$2.1M

Projected Annual Savings

4 min

Avg. Hold Time (from 47 min)

4.1/5

CSAT on AI-Contained Calls

Company Overview

HomeNest Direct operates one of the fastest-growing e-commerce platforms in the home goods and furniture category. With over 150,000 orders processed monthly and a product catalog of 12,000+ SKUs, their customer support operation was under constant pressure.

The Challenge

The Problem
That Needed Solving

78% of inbound calls were about four topics: order status, delivery tracking, returns, and exchange requests — all of which required agents to look up identical information across the same systems. Cost per call was $8.40. Agent turnover was at 38% annually — driven by the repetitive nature of high-volume, low-complexity calls that burnt out good agents. HomeNest's Head of Operations calculated that resolving the 78% of routine calls with automation could save over $2M annually.

Zaruda's Solution

How We Delivered
the Result

Weeks 1–2

Discovery & Configuration Planning

The Zaruda team embedded with HomeNest's customer service leadership to document the four primary call intents in detail: exact workflows, data systems accessed, decision trees, edge cases, and escalation triggers. We also reviewed the 1,000 most recent call transcripts to train the AI agent's domain understanding.

Weeks 3–4

Integration & Training

Zaruda's engineering team integrated AI Call Pro with HomeNest's order management system (OMS), their shipping carrier APIs, and their CRM. The AI agent was configured to look up real-time order status, generate return labels, initiate exchanges, and pull customer account data — the same actions a human agent would take. The AI agent voice was configured to match HomeNest's brand personality: warm, efficient, and resolution-focused.

Weeks 5–6

Testing & Soft Launch

Internal testing was followed by a controlled soft launch — 20% of inbound volume routed to AI Call Pro with dedicated monitoring. The Zaruda team reviewed conversation transcripts daily, identified edge cases and knowledge gaps, and refined the AI agent's responses continuously.

Week 7

Full Launch

At 94% confidence score on test conversations, AI Call Pro went live for 100% of inbound traffic — with seamless human escalation for calls the AI couldn't confidently handle.

Detailed Results

The Numbers That
Moved the Business

MetricResult

AI containment rate71% (from 0%)

Average hold time (peak)4 minutes (from 47 minutes)

Cost per resolved call (contained)$1.20 (from $8.40)

Agent turnover (annualized)Tracking toward 22% (from 38%)

CSAT score (AI-contained calls)4.1 / 5.0

Overall inbound volume growth+23% (handled without added headcount)

After 90 days, HomeNest was on track for $2.1M in annual cost savings, while their customer experience scores on AI-handled calls exceeded the baseline set by their human agents on the same call types. Their best agents were freed from order tracking calls. Their agent satisfaction scores went up. Turnover started to fall.

“

We were skeptical about the customer experience impact. Would people get frustrated with an AI? The data said no. Our CSAT on AI-handled calls was higher than human-handled calls for those same simple inquiry types — because the AI was faster, more consistent, and never had a bad day.

Head of Operations, HomeNest Direct [Fictional]