How Waverly Home Goods Handled 500+ Weekly Customer Emails Without Adding Staff
Challenge
Waverly Home Goods is a mid-sized e-commerce brand sellinghome décor and furniture through their own website and several retail partners.With a customer base spread across the US and a lean team of eight, thebusiness had grown faster than its operational capacity to keep up.
By late 2025, the customer inbox was receiving over 500 emailsper week. The majority fell into a handful of predictable categories: shippingstatus questions, return and exchange requests, product availability questions,discount code inquiries, and order modifications. Every one of them was beinganswered manually by two customer service team members who spent most of theirday in their inbox instead of handling higher-value customer issues.
During peak periods like holidays and sales events, thebacklog grew to the point where customers were waiting 12 to 24 hours forresponses to basic questions. The team had tried creating email templates tospeed things up, but templates still required someone to read every email,select the right template, personalize it, and send it. The volume was simplytoo high for the team size.
“We were copy-pasting the same answers all day,” said DianaPark, Head of Operations. “We knew it wasn’t scalable but we couldn’t justifyhiring more people just to answer email.”
Approach
Waverly connected their primary customer service Gmail inbox to InboxPilot in a single session. The setup process took under two hours.
The team spent the first week building out their KnowledgeCenter with:
• A full FAQ document covering their 40 most common customer questions
• Their return and exchange policy in full
• Shipping carrier information and standard delivery timelines
• Product availability and pre-order guidelines
• Discount code terms and conditions
• Ten email templates they had been using manually
They configured AI labeling with eight custom labels: OrderQuestion, Return Request, Shipping Status, Product Inquiry, Discount/Promo,Complaint, Wholesale Inquiry, and Misc. Email actions were set up to automatically archive newsletter bounce backs and route wholesale inquiries to a separate team member.
For the first two weeks, they ran InboxPilot in draft mode – the AI generated replies and the team reviewed them before sending. The draft accuracy was high enough that after two weeks they switched to auto-reply for their five highest-volume label categories, keeping draft mode only for complaints and wholesale inquiries.
Solution
Within four weeks, Waverly had replaced their manual emailresponse process with a fully automated system handling the majority of theirinbox volume without human involvement.
Standard questions about shipping timelines, return policies, and product availability were handled instantly and automatically. Customers received accurate, friendly responses within seconds regardless of time of day.The customer service team shifted their focus almost entirely to complaints, complex order issues, and wholesale relationships – the conversations that genuinely required human judgment.
The email backlog was eliminated entirely. Even during a flashsale in the third week of deployment – which generated the highest single-dayemail volume in the company’s history – every customer received a responsewithin two minutes.
Results
What’s next
With email operations running smoothly, Waverly is now deploying InboxPilot’s website chatbot on their product pages to answer pre-purchase questions from shoppers in real time. They are also expandingtheir Knowledge Center to include product-specific FAQs for their top 50 SKUs.
Their next milestone: full AI coverage of all standard customer email categories by Q3 2026, with the goal of allowing their customer service team to focus exclusively on relationship-building and complex issueresolution.
This case study is based on a composite of real customer experiences using InboxPilot’sAI email automation features.
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