Everyone's all Shopify screenshots and growth percentages. Nobody posts about customer service. But CX is one of the most important parts of building a brand today, and it's changing faster than almost anything else we do. CX was rolled into marketing at Ridge 24 months ago. And year to date: Orders are up 50% First reply time down 77% — 22 hours to 5 (email & contact form) All-in CX cost per order cut in half, to <$0.30 CSAT up to 95%, a 17% gain in three years All while headcount has stayed flat. We've thought about it in a few steps — in this order — so we can get the fundamentals right before scaling with AI. 1. Self-service first. Most people don't *want* to have to engage with CX. So we invested first in giving customers the tools to resolve their own tickets faster: better onsite FAQs, dedicated warranty portals, and improved self-serve returns and exchanges. So while orders have grown 50%, tickets have only increased 10% and conversations per order fell 25%. And of the contacts that do come in, 89.5% resolve without ever reaching an agent. 2. AI-enabled agents. Before anything got fully automated, we wanted to make our current agents better. That comes down to documentation — AI assistance is only as good as the specs, FAQs and SOPs you feed it. It's why I moved us to @Richpanel two years ago (not a sponsored post). Their 2.0 platform launched in Q1 with the intelligence-first tooling that will not only eventually power our support, but immediately equip our current agents to be more effective. 3. AI answering tickets end to end. The final form of CX is obviously tickets answered autonomously, and Q3 was the unlock. Today almost 40% of tickets are handled outright, at a 93.6% satisfaction score against 94.2% for our human team. It took a lot of iteration before the AI could answer tickets effectively and without the really annoying AI interactions that plague most CX touchpoints. There's still a lot to improve, and I wouldn't call any of this industry-leading. But the path has led to real efficiency gains and, more importantly, happier customers.

Looking for tattoo ideas for @codyplof. We had a deal: if Richpanel cut his CS spend by $500K this year, he’d get a Richpanel tattoo. Start of the year, he was at 18 agents. He is down to 8 agents now. Now I’m shopping for designs. The branding should pop on every podcast… and when he meets with the president. What should we ink?