- 37% of customer calls automated with Flip.
- 100% call response rate, ensuring every customer reaches support.
- 12 brands unified on one AI voice platform across multiple systems and workflows.
- 5+ years of partnership, scaling alongside 3Z’s growth from one brand to an enterprise portfolio.
How’s the quality of your mattress?
Ask Zach Gentry, the Director of Customer Experience at 3Z Brands, and the answer is simple: he’ll describe his own bed.
The Helix Midnight Luxe, he says, is “like giving a hug to the side of your body.” Built for side sleepers, it’s designed to relieve pressure at the hips and shoulders – and it’s become the company’s best-selling mattress.
That philosophy runs through every brand in the 3Z Brands portfolio, including Helix, Brooklyn Bedding, Bear, Birch, and Leesa. The goal has never been to build one great mattress. It’s to match each customer with the right mattress for the way they sleep.
For years, though, one part of the customer experience hadn’t caught up. 3Z knew how to fit a mattress to a person. As the company grew, fitting a phone call to a person became a different challenge altogether.
WHEN THE PHONES STOPPED
Contrary to what you might expect, this story doesn’t begin when the phones turned on. It begins when they were turned off.
It’s 2020.
Helix, 3Z’s flagship brand, had just launched phone support for the first time when the pandemic hit. Mattress orders surge, supply chains fall into chaos, and within weeks the customer experience team was underwater.
“When we launched, the phones were going off the hooks,” Zach says. “We actually had to make the decision to turn off our phones.”
Before then, phones had never been a major growth channel. They were a last resort.
Kristine Ambrosch, Senior Customer Experience Manager at 3Z, remembers a team that simply wasn’t built for sustained call volume.
“Phones honestly were very stressful for us,” she says. “We couldn’t really handle the volume.”
Calls became triage. Everything else backed up in an inbox for days.
Zach describes the team’s mindset at the time as less about solving problems than surviving them.
“We wanted to answer what we could and then move on to the next customer.”
IF IT ONLY DID THIS
Turning the phones back on wasn’t simply a matter of hiring more agents. 3Z needed a way to support a business that was growing faster than its customer experience team could scale.
At the time, nobody at 3Z was looking for an AI vendor. They were looking for a way to keep up with their own growth, and the team approached the search with plenty of skepticism.
“AI was still new in that sense at the time,” Kristine says. “We were worried it wouldn’t be helping people get what they need, and ultimately cause more escalations.”
Zach remembers evaluating Flip from a different perspective.
“The thing for me, when I was first introduced to Flip, I didn’t really see it as AI,” he says. “It was more like a digital assistant.”
What changed his mind wasn’t a conversation about automation. It was a single demo.
“Once I saw that the Flip system was capable of showing customers what their estimated shipping time is and other common questions, it was game-changing for us.”
Because 3Z builds every mattress to order, shipping timelines are constantly changing. Before Flip, none of their existing systems could answer the question customers asked most often: When will my order arrive?
“If it only did this,” Zach says, “then it would be worth it.”
That one capability became the turning point. It solved an immediate operational problem, but it also revealed something bigger: the right AI doesn’t replace the customer experience, it removes the friction that keeps teams from delivering it.
Today, Flip automates 37% of 3Z’s customer calls.
TWELVE BRANDS, ONE CHECKLIST
Eventually, the relationship stopped being about supporting one brand and became about supporting an entire portfolio.
In the five years since the merger of Brooklyn Bedding and Helix Sleep created 3Z Brands, the company has expanded to 12 brands. Every acquisition brought different systems, different knowledge bases, and different customer expectations. This means that Flip wasn’t rolled out once, it was rolled out 12 times.
“Each time we brought on a new team, we also brought on the different CRM systems they use,” Zach says.
By the time a new brand joins the portfolio, adding Flip has become routine.
“Flip was an integral part of our checklist. Did we add Flip? Check. And then moved on to the next one.”
Flip’s Shopify integration became the connective tissue underneath it—order status, address changes, cancellations—while Zendesk handles the cross-brand tangle that comes standard with running twelve labels under one roof.
Behind the scenes, Flip adapts to each brand’s systems while giving customers a consistent experience. Even when a customer accidentally calls the wrong brand, Flip sorts it, routes what needs routing, and keeps every brand sounding like itself on the way through.
INVISIBLE BY DESIGN
Ask Zach what his favorite feature is, and he doesn’t mention AI.
He talks about shipping.
A customer calls the day after placing an order to ask where their mattress is.
“Flip will say, ‘Looks like you just ordered yesterday. You can expect it to ship on this day.'”
It’s a simple interaction, but one that most automated systems get wrong. Instead of forcing customers through a series of questions, Flip anticipates what they’re asking, reinforces the expectations they were given at checkout, and delivers the answer in a natural, reassuring way.
For Kristine, the standout feature isn’t a feature at all – it’s how the conversations feel.
“I do love how conversational it is,” she says. “When I have to look back at a transcript for any reason… I just love how it actually sounds like a live person, as if it’s just having a conversation. I wonder, how is this AI?”
Customers notice the difference, too.
“Some people are really impressed,” Kristine says. “We have customers that say, ‘Oh wow, this is amazing.'”
RESULTS IN RETURNS
The impact shows up most clearly in returns.
Returning a mattress is a far more complicated process than dropping a T-shirt in the mail. Every pickup has to be scheduled, coordinated with a carrier, documented, and verified before a refund can be issued.
“Before Flip, it used to take us days and days to get all the details in order,” Zach says, describing a process that bounced between emails and phone calls before anything could even be scheduled.
Today, Flip guides customers through the process from the moment they call. It gathers the information needed to schedule the pickup, routes the request to the returns team, and follows up on the one detail that used to delay refunds: proof that the mattress has been picked up.
Customers upload that documentation through a link Flip sends them. From there, the returns team verifies it, issues the refund, and closes the case without requiring another phone call.
And this is just the first sign of a broader change.
“By implementing voice AI, we were able to essentially provide a 100% response rate to calls,” she says. “Instead of a call coming in and it being missed by a live agent, there’s never a time that our customers can’t get help.”
For Zach, that responsiveness begins with a philosophy. Rather than forcing callers through a traditional phone tree, Flip begins with a simple question.
“Flip says, ‘What do you need? Tell me in your own words, and then I can either help you or I can route you,’” Zach explains.
No phone tree. No guessing which button to press. Just a conversation that starts with the customer’s problem instead of the company’s menu.
NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS
Five or six years into most vendor relationships, there’s usually at least a single lingering frustration. Zach can’t think of one.
“I would say we rarely hear customer complaints as it relates to Flip,” he says. “Whenever there’s an issue of customer concern… no news is good news.”
For him, that silence is the strongest signal that the system is working. Just as importantly, the relationship itself has scaled alongside 3Z.
“With Flip, I don’t have to do a ton configuring on my end, which is a really big difference between some of our bigger partners,” he says. “I’ve never felt like Flip has gotten too big, or we’re just an old client. They’re very responsive.”
When asked what would happen if Flip disappeared tomorrow, Kristine doesn’t hesitate.
“If Flip wasn’t there, we wouldn’t be able to have phones on for as long,” she says. “You’re losing all of those shoppers who are close to placing an order, essentially. So you’re losing sales, like 100%. We would lose money. We would lose customers.”
In the end, her answer is simple:
“We are too big. We need Flip.”
NEXT UP
Neither Zach nor Kristine talks about Flip as a finished project. For both of them, the goal hasn’t changed – remove more friction and resolve more conversations without sacrificing the customer experience.
Kristine predicts Flip playing a bigger role in sales conversations and becoming better at recognizing frustration before a customer ever even reaches a live agent.
Zach is focused on something subtler: making conversations feel even more natural by handling multiple questions at once instead of one at a time.
He’s also thinking beyond the phone itself. As 3Z continues to invest in AI across the business, he sees Flip becoming part of a broader ecosystem – one that keeps customer information, context, and conversations connected across every brand.
The company has grown from two brands to twelve. If there’s one lesson that’s carried through all of that growth, it’s that customer support has to scale without feeling standardized.
The mattress was never one-size-fits-all. Neither is the person calling about it.
The expectation, though, is always the same: every customer deserves an answer.
