How Comfrt Achieved 65% Automation During Explosive Growth

When Comfrt became the #1 selling brand on TikTok Shop, their success brought an unexpected challenge: their ticket volume tripled in just three months. 

For a brand focused on mental health and well-being, maintaining rapid, empathetic customer support meant more than hitting certain metrics—it was central to their mission.

The challenge

When Kristen McClure joined as Head of Customer Experience, Comfrt was on the cusp of becoming viral. 

"When I started in August, we were averaging around 41,000 emails per month, and we had nine agents," she explains. "By November, we were receiving 125,420 emails per month."

Despite scaling the team dramatically–from 9 to 41 agents–they couldn't keep pace with demand. 

"It just wasn't enough. We were treading water," Kristen recalls. "My heart broke because I recognized that our customers who are getting Comfrt for the first time and experiencing this amazing thing and then reaching out to us for whatever reason, aren't getting responses as quickly as they should."

The stakes were particularly high, given their customer base. "Our brand is focused on mental health and well-being, and a lot of customers swear that Comfrt helps with their daily anxiety and stress," Kristen notes. “If our customers have to wait a week or two weeks for a response, that can be devastating."

The solution

Realizing that scaling their team linearly was not the answer to the overwhelming volume they faced, Comfrt made a bold decision. 

They would implement Siena AI while transitioning to a new help desk platform. 

As their existing CRM system was incompatible with Siena, the team undertook an ambitious project to deploy both Zendesk and Siena during the peak holiday season–and completed the entire implementation in just three weeks.

Building trust through testing

Siena stood out as a solution because of a few features. One of these is the Playground.

Kristen insisted on thorough testing before deployment–despite the compressed timeline they were working with. 

"It was important to me that I could see Siena in action before putting her in action," she explains. "That Playground really built my confidence in this generative, empathic AI. I could take a customer's email address and pretend to be that person, throw whatever I could at Siena, and see what would happen."

Developing the right persona

Another key feature that heavily impacted their approach to customer service is the Persona Studio. 

The team thoughtfully named their AI agent "Brooke." 

As Kristen explains, "Brooke is like a stream. It just sounds like a comforting word." This is the attention to detail required to make sure every interaction felt genuinely supportive. The team was especially focused on ensuring that automated responses wouldn't feel robotic or impersonal. 

"One of the biggest things that can frustrate customers (other than having to wait for a response) is to not feel heard and to feel like they're talking to a robot," Kristen notes. This is the opposite of what interacting with Brooke feels like. 

Maintaining high-quality and personal interactions

One of Siena's most unique features is AI reasoning. This made it especially easy to troubleshoot responses that weren’t perfect–yet.

“I created a tag for my team so they can identify conversations that Brooke didn’t handle well. That way I can immediately go in, look at that conversation, and figure out what Brooke’s thought process was,” Kristen notes. “Being able to see that laid out in such a clear way, and using the AI assistant to help me with the wording if I'm not quite getting the response I want is so huge.”

The results

It was an ambitious, three-week sprint but Comfrt saw immediate results:

• A 65% automation rate.
• A 64% reduction in response times.

The team was particularly impressed by Siena's ability to handle higher volumes than their entire human team–while hitting the right tone with their customers.

Ironically, Siena helped them move away from the very things that often make human support feel robotic. 

"Brooke allowed us to move away from macros," Kristen explains. "We have more time and more dedication towards things that require that human touch. And she meets customers who have those basic inquiries with empathy, kindness, and personality."

"Brooke is one single AI and yet solving more tickets in a week than our human team," Kristen shares. "We have faster response times, faster resolution times, higher customer satisfaction, and that's huge to say."

For the first time in months, the team eliminated their backlog. “I've never seen an AI system set up like this that can do what Brooke does."

Looking ahead

At Comfrt, Brooke has become a full member of the team.

"This is like adding a person to your team who can work 24/7/365, is always nice, no matter what the customer says to them, always follows your policies and procedures, and always provides the best possible care and service. And that's just not something that we can realistically hire for."

Comfrt can push the boundaries of empathetic customer service at scale with a solid foundation of automated support handling routine inquiries. Siena didn’t just help them scale rapidly, she also helped them transform how they connect with and support their customers.

Want to turn overwhelming growth into outstanding service? Learn how Siena can help you scale support while keeping it personal. Schedule a free demo today!

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