How Goody Handled 3x More Conversations While Improving Quality

"I was very anti-AI just because I grew up in a generation pre- and post-Internet. And AI is a scary tool if not used properly."

These are the words of Miles Johnson, who helps run the customer experience team at Goody, a corporate gifting platform that has experienced rapid growth.

With a small team handling both customer inquiries and operational responsibilities for over 450 brand partnerships, Goody found themselves at a breaking point during the holiday season.

And implementing an AI agent was the turning point in helping their team manage a massive surge in volume.

The challenge

"This was my fourth holiday season. Holidays is when we are the most overwhelmed with business and also joyfully overwhelmed," explains Miles. "We started out with just two of us a couple years ago and now we have 4 full-time CX people. But not only do we do CX, we also do operations."

This meant the team was constantly pulled between providing timely, personalized customer support and managing the operational background needed to keep orders flowing smoothly across their 450+ brand partnerships.

Like many businesses, Goody experiences dramatic volume increases during the holiday season. Managing live chat response times during those surges with a lean team was very challenging.

Despite that, the team was reluctant to implement solutions that might compromise the personalized, human experience they valued.

Miles was concerned that AI would create robotic interactions that could damage customer relationships.

The solution

Out of necessity, Goody evaluated multiple AI solutions.

Siena stood out for its humanistic approach to customer interactions.

"We were looking for something that felt organic to us," Miles explains. "We are a small business that's growing and we are very customer focused. So we were looking for something that was a tool and an aid rather than a replacement for humans."

Natural responses

What immediately stood out about Siena was its ability to provide responses that felt genuinely human—a critical factor for Goody's personal, emotionally-driven gifting business.

"What we were looking for specifically was a very humanistic approach to AI, where you don't feel like you're speaking to a robot," Miles explains. "Siena offered that curated, bespoke, humanistic approach to AI."

The quality of Siena's responses often surprised the team, sometimes even improving upon their existing communication standards.

Miles notes: "There were days when we were training Siena where I'd be like, 'I can't believe she picked this up and then created her own way to make it her own.' Sometimes I'd read some of her responses and be like, 'This is better than things that I would have written.'"

In fact, Miles has gone back and changed some of Goody's existing macros based on Siena's more effective wording and approaches—a testament to the AI's ability to enhance rather than simply mimic human responses.

The team even personalized their Siena instance, giving it a gender-neutral name: "Our email AI's name is Maximum—Max for short—because we wanted to have a gender-fluid name, since Siena's not male or female."

This level of natural communication meant customers interacting with Siena received the warm, helpful responses they expected from Goody.

AI Assistant for workflow optimization

For Kelsey Mead, who led the operational implementation, one feature particularly stood out: the AI Assistant.

"When we started tweaking automations, the AI assistant was incredibly helpful," Kelsey explains. "We would sometimes run into issues with automations not providing an expected response, and it was really helpful to have prompts that would clearly direct us as to what tweaks we should make to elicit the types of responses we wanted."

What impressed her most was how intuitive the feature made the process: "I was really impressed by how clear the direction was, how it was able to understand the issue. The output it provided made it really easy to make those tweaks on the fly without having to sit down and really think about it."

This built-in guidance transformed what could have been a complex technical process into something the team could manage efficiently, even without deep AI expertise.

Collaborative implementation

As the first company to integrate Siena with Intercom, Goody worked closely with the Siena team to pioneer this connection, requiring significant collaboration on both sides.

Kelsey led the operational implementation, focusing on creating effective workflows between the systems.

"I helped build out a lot of the workflows, design how Intercom would interact with Siena," she explains.

The process required technical expertise and ongoing optimization to ensure the two platforms communicated effectively.

What stood out most to the Goody team was Siena's partnership approach during implementation. Unlike other vendors who might provide a product and minimal support, Siena's team remained actively engaged throughout the process.

"Shout out to that entire team," Kelsey emphasizes. "I work with a lot of various vendor relationships, and I would say Siena has been the most hands-on in terms of helping us with implementation. Having that Slack channel is huge. The dedicated support that we've gotten from your team has been really valuable."

Miles adds: "The ease of iteration was impressive. If we needed something, they'd say, 'Okay, let's figure out if we can make this work or design something differently with you.' It's like creating these relationships before we all blow it out of the water and become billionaires."

The results

After implementing Siena, Goody saw immediate and significant improvements.

• Siena can handle 42% of customer conversations—an impressive achievement for a business with complex, nuanced products and services.
• They were able to maintain their goal of a 5-minute response time on live chat, despite their volume tripling over the holiday season.

Siena has also enabled the team to provide round-the-clock support.

"Being able to provide round-the-clock responses has been incredibly valuable," explains Kelsey. "In times when people reach out when there isn't anyone online, it's amazing that now we have someone there who can help answer those questions during off-hours."

Miles echoes this sentiment: "A lot of people don't realize in customer service and customer support that we're humans and we have to sleep and people need to take time off. Having a tool like Siena helps give people a touch point and an expectation."

Ultimately, the biggest shift was in their own perception of the role of AI in customer service.

"For businesses that fluctuate like us or any business period, it's freeing up time to do the more important things, like escalations," Miles explains. "If you can't get out of the weeds ever, then you can't really accomplish moving to the next level."

He continues: "As someone who was against AI before, I see the need and the positive effects of AI. I think it gets a bad rap because we think AI is going to replace humans. But it can be used to actually organize humans."

This recognition—that AI can handle routine tasks to create space for higher-value work—shows their shift from seeing AI as a threat to embracing it as an enabler of more meaningful human interactions.

Looking ahead

The success of their initial implementation has Goody looking toward deeper integration to expand Siena's capabilities in their customer experience operations.

"We're looking into integrating Siena into our specifically-built system where all of our information comes into. Siena is currently not attached to it," Miles explains.

This would allow Siena to access more detailed order and product information, potentially increasing the percentage of conversations it can handle independently.

With Siena handling a significant portion of routine inquiries, Goody can now reallocate team resources to more strategic initiatives.

"With Siena's support now we can reallocate that bandwidth and time," explains Kelsey. "That extra time frees up Miles and Christina's efforts to be able to refocus on other types of optimization work we want to do across CX."

Struggling to balance growth with authentic customer connections? Let's talk about how Siena can help you deliver faster, more consistent support while maintaining the human touch that builds customer loyalty.

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