How Khoros Cut Support Spend by $450K and Reversed a 20-Week Backlog Climb
Moving off Salesforce to Kayako One, Khoros turned a backlog that had climbed for 20 straight weeks back downward, without new headcount or weekend overtime.
Key Outcomes & Metrics
- $450K in annual support spend cut
- 70% faster resolution time
- 49% fewer support seats
- 78% → 91% customer satisfaction
Khoros was in an escalating support crisis. Their L1 backlog had climbed for 20 consecutive weeks, reaching 1,363 tickets just two weeks before they moved to Kayako One, up 107% from four weeks prior. Everything bottlenecked at L1, and response times had stretched from hours into days. Agent frustration was mounting, and leadership wanted the backlog gone, not managed.
The Challenge
The team had tried the usual incremental fixes: faster routing, dashboard redesigns, more careful prioritization. None of them changed the shape of the problem, because the problem was that too many tickets reached an agent in the first place and too many of them stalled at a single tier. On top of the operational strain, the support stack sat on Salesforce, carrying a heavy annual license cost that scaled with seats rather than with value delivered.
The Solution
Rather than optimize the existing flow, Kayako One changed it in three ways. AI-driven triage routed issues automatically and auto-resolved the repetitive ones, removing the manual sorting step entirely. L1 agents were cross-skilled to handle a set of L2 issues, so escalation bottlenecks stopped forming before they started. And dedicated backlog-blitz weeks, with weekly burn-down targets, kept the team's momentum visible and honest.
The migration itself was quiet. A four-person team working at half capacity moved roughly 40,000 Salesforce tickets and the entire knowledge base to Kayako One over three weeks with zero customer downtime. Agents were productive after a single day of training, and the system hit roughly 50% auto-resolution in its first week.
"We stopped managing the backlog and started preventing it. That was the shift. The tickets that used to pile up now never reach a person."
The Results
Within eight weeks, resolution time improved 70% to under a day, agent time per ticket dropped 50% to about 1.5 hours, and first-touch resolution rose from 62% to 81%. Customer satisfaction climbed 13 points to 91%. The 19% reduction in L1 backlog reversed a 20-week climb and held its downward trend.
On cost, retiring the Salesforce support licenses eliminated $885,789 in gross annual spend and cut net support spend by roughly $450K a year, while the support footprint shrank from 67 seats to 34. The team moved from firefighting a growing queue to running a support operation that prevents the queue from forming.
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.
