A 9-person outdoor gear brand cleared its support inbox from same-day to under 2 minutes.
Highline never hired a support team. The founder and one generalist ops hire split the Zendesk inbox between product launches, and most of what came in was the same handful of questions asked a different way.
Resolution AgentThe bottleneck
Order status and refund requests made up more than half of daily ticket volume, and each one meant opening Shopify and Stripe separately to find the real answer before replying.
The founder estimated spending two to three hours a day on tickets during peak season, time that came directly out of product and marketing work.
Response time slipped to same-day or later during launch weeks, right when new customers were most likely to have a question and least likely to wait.
Nobody owned the inbox full-time, so the same return policy got explained differently depending on which of the two people answered, which generated its own follow-up tickets.
The workflow
We deployed the Resolution Agent against Highline's Zendesk, Shopify, and Stripe accounts to handle order status, refunds, and returns end-to-end, starting with the highest-volume ticket type first: "where's my order."
Once order-status replies were running clean for two weeks, we turned on refunds and returns, the two categories with real dollars attached, so the founder could watch the agent's judgment before trusting it with money.
Refunds under a set threshold clear automatically with the reasoning logged to the ticket; anything above it, or anything ambiguous, routes to the founder with the order history already attached instead of a bare ticket number.
The agent replies in Highline's existing tone of voice across email and the chat widget, pulling the same return policy language every time, so customers couldn't tell the difference between a resolved ticket and one a person answered.
“I used to block off an hour every morning just for the inbox before I could start anything else. Now I check it once to see what actually needed me.”
Founder, Highline Outdoor Co.
Lessons learned
Start with the ticket type you already dread
Highline's team could name the ticket type that ate the most time without checking a report: order status. That gut instinct is usually right, and it means the first slice of automation lands on the highest-volume, lowest-judgment work, which is exactly where an agent earns trust fastest.
Let dollar thresholds do the trusting for you
Instead of asking the founder to approve every refund or none of them, Highline set a dollar line and let the agent clear anything under it on its own. A numeric guardrail is easier to reason about than a vague sense of what's "routine," and it's easy to move once the agent proves itself.
Consistency is worth more than any one clever reply
Highline's real problem wasn't slow answers, it was two people giving slightly different answers to the same question. An agent that gives the same correct answer every time closes that gap on its own, which matters more at small scale than any single reply being exceptionally good.
Roll out money-touching workflows after trust, not before
Order status went live first and ran clean before refunds were turned on. Sequencing the rollout that way gave the founder a low-stakes way to watch the agent's judgment before handing it anything that touched a customer's card.
“The refund threshold was the part I was nervous about. Two months in, I've adjusted it once, and it was to raise it.”
Operations Lead, Highline Outdoor Co.