How Fernwood cleared a 900-ticket backlog in nine days

Fernwood sells furniture that takes eight weeks to build, which means most of their support volume is one question asked a thousand different ways: where is it.

By the first week of December the queue had reached nine hundred. Nine people were answering, and the honest arithmetic said they would still be behind in February. “We were not failing at anything difficult,” says Maya Ellis, who runs support. “We were failing at repeating ourselves.”

The first week

They connected the shared inbox on a Monday and pointed Reply at their help centre and four years of closed tickets. No flows, no decision trees, no labelling exercise. By Wednesday it was answering delivery questions with the real build stage pulled off the order, and by Friday it had taken four hundred conversations off the queue.

The part Maya did not expect was the tone. “It writes like whoever wrote our shipping page, because that is what it read. Our customers did not notice a handover, which is the whole point.”

The first morning I opened the inbox and there was nothing in it, I assumed something had broken.Maya Ellis, Head of Support

What stayed human

Fernwood set the confidence threshold high on anything touching a refund or a damaged delivery. Those still go to a person — but they arrive summarised, with the order open and photographs already attached.

“The handover is the underrated feature,” Maya says. “My team used to spend the first two minutes of every ticket reading. Now they spend it deciding.”

Nine days later

The backlog hit zero on a Wednesday. Fernwood went through their busiest quarter on record without adding a seasonal hire, and first response time settled at eleven seconds against a four-hour target nobody had ever hit.

Two of the nine agents have since moved onto the onboarding team. “That is the number I care about,” Maya says. “Not the deflection rate. The two people who got a better job out of it.”