The challenge
UrbanDrop is a Berlin-based ecommerce brand specialising in urban lifestyle accessories — bags, tech accessories, and apparel. With a loyal customer base across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, they had grown to €4M+ in annual revenue by mid-2025. But their customer support operation hadn't scaled with the business.
During normal periods, their 4-person support team could just about keep up. But during sales events — Black Friday, end-of-season clearances, new product drops — the inbox became unmanageable. At peak, they were receiving over 600 support emails per day, roughly 4× their baseline volume. Average response times stretched to 18–24 hours. Negative reviews mentioning slow support started appearing.
"We'd bring in temporary contractors during sales, which worked but was expensive and inconsistent — they didn't know our products or our tone," said Lena Hoffmann, UrbanDrop's Head of Operations. "And even then, the volume sometimes beat us."
The underlying problem was structural: 70–75% of their tickets were routine and repetitive — order status, return initiation, shipping queries, discount code issues. Every hour spent by a trained team member on these was an hour not spent on the complex cases that actually needed human judgment.
- 600+ tickets/day during sales events
- 18–24 hour response times at peak
- €15k+/month in support staff costs
- Temporary contractors hired for every sale
- Negative reviews citing slow response
- Team burned out after every sales event
- 73% of all tickets resolved autonomously
- 3-minute average response time, 24/7
- €12k/month saved vs. previous support costs
- No seasonal contractors needed
- Human team focuses on complex, high-value cases
- CSAT score up from 3.7 to 4.6 out of 5
The solution
We integrated Aria with UrbanDrop's helpdesk (Freshdesk), their Shopify store, and their returns management portal. We spent two sessions building the knowledge base — pulling from their FAQs, return policy, product catalogue, and shipping carrier tracking APIs.
The goal was to automate the "easy 70%" completely, and enrich every ticket that needed human attention with full context before it landed on a team member's screen:
Order status & tracking bot
When a customer asks "where is my order?", Aria pulls live tracking data from their carrier API (DHL, DPD, UPS), interprets the status in plain language, and replies instantly. This alone accounted for 38% of all tickets — now fully automated.
Returns & refunds initiation
Aria handles return requests end-to-end: verifying the order, checking eligibility against return policy, generating a return label via their portal, and sending it to the customer. No human needed unless the case is outside policy.
Product & FAQ resolution
Size guides, material questions, compatibility queries, discount codes, gift wrapping, international shipping costs — Aria handles these from a rich, curated knowledge base that the team can update in real time via a simple editor.
Smart escalation with full context
When Aria encounters something outside its scope — a damaged item, a fraud dispute, an angry VIP customer — it escalates to the human team with a structured brief: order history, previous messages, customer value tier, and a suggested response direction. Human resolution time cut by 60%.
"Our Black Friday this year was the smoothest we've ever had. We did 3.2× the revenue of the previous year and our support SLA was actually better than a normal week. That's insane. Aria made that possible."
Deployment timeline
The results
Three months in, UrbanDrop's support operation looks fundamentally different. Their 4-person team now handles roughly 160 tickets per day — the complex, high-value ones — instead of grinding through 600. Their CSAT score climbed from 3.7 to 4.6 out of 5, driven largely by near-instant response times at any hour.
The financial impact was stark. Before Aria, UrbanDrop was spending €15,000–17,000 per month on support staff including seasonal contractors. After deployment, that's down to around €3,000 for the retained core team. Aria's cost is a fraction of what they were previously paying for contractors alone.
"We've calculated that Aria saves us around €12,000 a month net — more during sale months. But honestly, the number I care most about is our response time. 3 minutes versus 18 hours. That's the metric that builds customer loyalty," said Hoffmann.
"I was worried our customers would feel like they were talking to a robot. But Aria's replies are so well-calibrated — warm, accurate, on-brand — that we've had customers specifically compliment our 'amazing support team' not knowing it was AI. That's when I knew we'd done this right."