Aisha Rao runs Customer Operations at Northwind Traders. After 18 months of frustrated phone queues, she replaced the entire IVR system with AIVA — and watched her support volume halve in three weeks.
Our support team has shrunk by half — not because we replaced anyone, but because their incoming volume halved. Everyone got promoted into work they actually like.
The challenge
By early 2024, Northwind was shipping 12,000 orders a month and growing fast. The thing growing faster: their support volume. Phone wait times had crept past 8 minutes. Customers were giving up — and writing about it.
The team had tried the obvious things. They added two more agents. They built an IVR menu. They published a help center with 200+ articles. Nothing made a real dent. “We were spending more on support than on shipping,” Aisha says. “And our CSAT was still 3.2 out of 5.”
The real problem wasn't volume — it was repetition. Roughly 60% of every call was about three things: where's my order, can I change my address, and how do returns work. Their team was reading the same script 800 times a week. They needed something that could handle the boring 60% so humans could focus on the rest.
Average phone wait time of 8 minutes 12 seconds during peak hours.
Support team handling 4,200 tickets/month, 60% on the same three repeat questions.
CSAT stuck at 3.2/5 for nine consecutive months.
Two failed attempts at chatbots that customers refused to talk to.
The setup
Aisha's team had blocked off a full day for the AIVA setup. They didn't need it. The first voice call was answered three minutes after they signed up.
“I genuinely thought we'd done something wrong,” she remembers. “I called the number from my mobile, and it picked up on the first ring in fluent Hindi.” The team spent the rest of the day pointing AIVA at their order system, their refund policy, and a Notion knowledge base. By 4 PM, they'd handled their first 17 real customer calls without a human in the loop.
They went live with two channels — Voice for inbound calls, Web for the embedded chat widget on their site. Both routed to the same AIVA assistant, which kept the customer's context as they switched channels. A customer who started a chat at 11 AM and called back at 3 PM never had to repeat themselves.
The biggest win wasn't the AI itself. It was the ability to wire AIVA directly into Northwind's order management system. Now when a customer asks about #4827, AIVA pulls the actual record, sees it's been delayed, and proactively offers a refund of the shipping fee. No human approval needed for refunds under ₹500.
The outcomes
The thing I keep coming back to is that no one on my team got fired or moved. They got promoted. They handle the genuinely hard tickets now — the angry-VIP escalations, the multi-step returns, the press inquiries. AIVA handles the boring 60%. Everyone's happier.
— Aisha Rao, Head of Customer Operations, Northwind Traders