How Contently Scaled Support for 165,000+ Creators Without Adding an Agent

Kayako's AI resolved 68% of tickets autonomously across a two-sided marketplace, delivering near-instant answers to enterprise brands and 165,000+ freelance creators alike.

Key Outcomes & Metrics

  • 68% autonomous resolution rate
  • 91 sec average first response time
  • $1.8M in support costs avoided
  • 3.7 → 4.6 CSAT (out of 5.0)

Contently runs a two-sided marketplace connecting enterprise brands with more than 165,000 freelance creators. Both sides generate support tickets, but with very different urgency. Freelancers need fast answers on payment status, assignments, and contracts. Enterprise clients need complex workflow support. At peak, the team was handling 8,500+ tickets a month and responding in six to eight hours, with both audiences funneling into a single queue.

The Challenge

The structure was the problem. One queue could not serve two populations with opposite needs, and the repetitive freelancer tickets were drowning out the complex enterprise work that actually required a human. Response times suffered on both sides, and the imbalance was not sustainable as the creator base kept growing.

"We had two completely different kinds of customers, and the repetitive tickets were drowning us. That imbalance wasn't sustainable. Something had to change."

Sarah Mitchell, VP of Customer Experience, Contently

The Solution

Contently deployed Kayako's AI agent through an API integration, with no platform migration. The rollout started where volume was highest and complexity lowest: freelancer queries about payment status, assignments, and billing. The AI triaged every ticket by user type and intent, handled the routine questions autonomously, drafted replies for the complex ones, and escalated intelligently when a human was the right call. The knowledge base updated itself from resolved tickets, so the system kept getting better on its own. Full deployment across both audiences took four months.

The Results

Within 90 days, first response time dropped 98%, from 6.4 hours to 91 seconds, and CSAT rose 24%, from 3.7 to 4.6 out of 5. Kayako's AI reached 68% autonomous resolution with a 94% escalation-accuracy rating, so the tickets that did reach an agent were the ones that genuinely needed one.

By absorbing the repetitive load, Contently avoided hiring three additional agents and saved $1.8M over 18 months, all without reducing service quality or adding headcount. The support team went from having, in their words, the hardest job in the company to running a marketplace-scale operation that answers most questions before a person is ever involved.

About Kayako

Kayako is a complete, modern AI help desk platform. Run Kayako One as your full help desk, or deploy the Kay AI Agent into the help desk you already use. Either way, the entire implementation is led by our experts, so your AI is configured, trained, and tuned to succeed.

Support leaders partner with Kayako to scale customer support without scaling headcount, one queue at a time. Most teams are live in days, with 80% of repetitive tickets automated within 90, so cost per ticket falls while CSAT climbs.

Book Your Scaling Support Strategy Session

When Kayako is implemented, we consistently see CSAT improve. That is the ultimate measure of customer support. But CSAT does not move on its own. It improves when the right leading metrics are in place.

The three key indicators to improve are:

  • First Contact Resolution: The fewer tickets it takes to solve, the better.
  • Total Resolution Time: The faster we respond, the better.
  • Cost per Ticket: The more efficiently we resolve, the better.

We invite you to book a strategy session with our team so that we can explore how Kayako can help you scale your support organization without scaling headcount.

The leading support metrics, first contact resolution, resolution time, and cost per ticket, feeding a rising CSAT score

Hear from Support Leaders Boosting CSAT, Reducing Resolution Time, and Increasing First Contact Resolution without Scaling Headcount Thanks to Kayako AI

“Kayako cut our ticket age from 18 hours to under 5 and half of those tickets disappeared entirely. We weren't buying a new interface. We were buying a cost reset.”
Colin Guilfoyle
SVP of Customer Support, Trilogy
“Every time we lost a support agent, it cost us $20,000 and three months of scrambling. Since we brought in Kayako, that's changed. It handles the repetitive stuff, and our agents finally have room to breathe.”
Balaji Jayaraman
VP of Customer Support, Aurea
“Kayako One transformed our support operations. What used to take hours now takes minutes. Our customers are happier, our agents are more productive, and we are saving thousands every month.”
Aditi Garg
VP of Customer Support, Tivian

Eliminated 80% of support tickets and saved $5M.

Read case study

White-glove onboarding that gets Kayako working fast

“Every other vendor I've evaluated sends you a login and some documentation and says good luck. Kayako assigned a team to our account for 90 days to set up their AI agent Kay and the whole platform. They were in our environment configuring routing, structuring the knowledge base, and testing scenarios with us. I didn't have to become a Kayako expert to get results.”
Deniz Y.
VP of Customer Support
5.0 / 5 on G2

Surprisingly human, high-quality AI replies that nail customer context

“The quality of responses from Kay (Kayako's AI support agent) surprised me. I was expecting generic, template-sounding answers, and instead they are specific to the customer's actual situation, referencing details from their email and addressing each point. I spot-checked about 50 tickets in the first month and only flagged two.”
Syed H.
Solutions Support AI Architect
4.5 / 5 on G2

From assisted replies to confident autonomous ticket handling

“Kay doesn't start by taking over. It starts by suggesting replies and showing them to your agents. They review, tweak, send. After a couple of weeks the drafts are getting better and you're changing less and less. Eventually you're just hitting send. That's when you flip those ticket types to autonomous. We did it one category at a time.”
Uba A.
VP of Growth
4.5 / 5 on G2

Avoided $18M in support costs.

Read case study

Kayako changed the game for us

“We moved to Kayako because our support team was drowning in repeat tickets: password resets, 'where's my order,' and basic how-tos. What Kayako promised, and actually delivered, was eliminating most of those before a human ever got involved.”
Etee D.
Head of Customer Success
4.5 / 5 on G2

The AI agent handles complex attachments fast

“A customer sent a ticket with five attachments: screenshots, a debug log over 20MB, and a file full of error codes. Kay, the built-in AI agent, went through every file, found the relevant error buried in the log, matched it to the screenshots, and wrote a response with proper troubleshooting steps. Took maybe five minutes. A human would have needed half an hour.”
James S.
Support team, Mid-Market
4.5 / 5 on G2

Kayako AI makes support easier

“I love how the AI helps us reply to tickets faster. The summaries and suggestions save a lot of time. Plus self-learning mode: it picks up content from past tickets and generates accurate answers based on them, which helps keep replies consistent.”
Anna K.
Customer Care Representative
4.0 / 5 on G2

Cut spend by $450K and backlog by 19%, off Salesforce.

Read case study

I wish everybody used Kayako

“The flexibility of the software: webhooks, adjusting virtually any field. Where other software forces me to shape my business process around the system, with Kayako I can shape the system to fit my process. We integrated it with our Slack channel and our finance system, and now the majority of our administrative work is automated.”
Eege K.
Service Manager
4.5 / 5 on G2

The best help desk software

“Kayako provides a simple integration for several support platforms in one solution. Whether I use the web, email, phone, or live chat, it lets me easily obtain and manage customer messages and provide the appropriate response.”
Joseph L.
Administrator
5.0 / 5 on G2

Reporting you can actually act on

“Kayako offers a wonderful view of the dashboard, so you won't get overwhelmed with the information you're receiving. The KQL Report Generator is easy to understand and lets you extract relevant information and set statistics based on your own specifications.”
Don J.
Marketing Specialist
4.5 / 5 on G2

Reached 68% autonomous resolution across 30+ products.

Read case study

Solid, no-frills customer support suite

“Kayako offers all the fundamentals of a customer support channel plus some great features. Custom domains, email forwarding, chat-based support, knowledge base and help center, it's all there. Macros and rules make organizing workflows easy, and the collaborator seats are great for people who just need to see customer cases.”
Donnie S.
Technical Associate
4.0 / 5 on G2

Great for live chat across languages

“Ease of use makes it very appealing, and you can create template responses when replying to customers. We deal with customers around the world in various languages and never had issues with Chinese or Russian alphabets. It also lets you initiate conversations and look up a customer's location to serve them better.”
Temur D.
Technical Support Specialist
4.5 / 5 on G2

A good helpdesk and live chat platform

“Simple, easy, and low cost. It also has a good team-management feature to assign support staff to specific customers, which keeps everything organized as we grow.”
Rajdeep D.
Founder and CEO
4.5 / 5 on G2

Scaled support for 165,000+ creators with zero new agents.

Kayako improved our customer communication

“It organizes all your emails into folders by department and by the nature of the content, and the interface can be customized to your requirements. It has genuinely improved professional communication across our company.”
Robert T.
Software Engineer
4.5 / 5 on G2
+300 more

Your Executive Team Has Already Decided AI Should Be Cutting Support Costs.

91% of customer service leaders are under executive pressure to implement AI (Gartner, 2026). The question in your next QBR is not whether you are automating. It is which queue you proved it on, and what it saved.

  • Pick one queue and prove the number
  • Cut cost per ticket without cutting CSAT
  • Show a result in 90 days, not 12 months
A mountain of support tickets with a single queue lifted out and marked in purple, routed through the Kayako AI agent to a support agent handling the resolved tickets, above a chart showing cost per ticket falling over 90 days

The Playbook We Use to Scale Support.

We have spent years helping support teams clear backlogs, raise CSAT, and hold costs down while volume climbs. This guide hands you those same steps, the practices we run with our own teams, so yours can put them to work.