75% of customer calls automated, guided by over 95% intent coverage
In the kitchen, results depend less on how many tools you have and more on how you use them.
The same is true for phone support.
Phone calls bring urgency, emotion, and edge cases all at once. Without a clear design, it’s easy for the experience to become inconsistent or overwhelming. Phone support was never meant to grow by default at Caraway Home. It was designed to be deliberate.
“I actually found Flip while trying to prove that customers don’t want automation on their phones,” said Nancy Gurd, Director of Customer Experience at Caraway. “They just want to speak to a person.”
Gurd approached voice automation with skepticism. She didn’t believe in defaulting phone support to human agents – nor did she believe customers would tolerate poorly designed automation. Voice channels, she felt, were too emotional and too consequential to be handled without intention.
“If you met me five years ago, I would have never said I was launching any kind of live phone service,” she recalls. “Agents don’t belong on the end of that. That was my belief, but I was thoroughly proved wrong.”
Today, with a phone channel built to balance AI and human interaction, the CX team at Caraway tells a very different story.
A Deliberate Recipe
For Caraway, the voice channel was about being there when it mattered.
“Our phone number is only on post-purchase emails,” Gurd explained. “We don’t promote it in high-traffic points. We wanted customers to know they had access when it mattered – not that they were just a number.”
That same intention shaped how Caraway approached automation.
“We don’t implement AI to deflect,” said Ashley Harris, Senior Customer Experience Manager. “The goal isn’t to avoid customers. It’s to help them get answers quickly, while allowing human agents to focus on more complex or personal situations.”
Flip became the layer that made that approach possible.
Through voice automation and analytics, Flip gave the team visibility into how customers actually used the phone channel: which issues prompted calls, where customers preferred self-service, and when a human conversation truly mattered.
“With Flip, we were able to understand our consumers,” Gurd said. “And place humans where they needed to be.”
Implementing Flip & Letting It Cook
Once Flip was in place, the focus wasn’t experimentation. It was reliability.
“Onboarding Flip was seamless,” Gurd explained, with Harris noting that, “It’s a tool that doesn’t require micromanagement.”
Rather than introducing new complexity, Flip settled into Caraway’s CX stack as a stable, dependable layer – quietly handling phone interactions while staying easy to adjust as processes evolved.
“The few times I’ve had to go in and update something, it’s been really easy to find what I need,” said Colin Waters, Warranty & Support Manager. “Usually it’s a small tweak, and it’s live instantly.”
Senior Customer Success Manager Jeff Robie and the Flip team worked as true partners to Caraway, offering guidance that made support feel collaborative and empowering.
“Jeff doesn’t just fix things for us,” Waters added. “He shows you how to do it, so you feel confident making changes yourself.”
The result was a phone system that ran smoothly without demanding constant attention or specialized oversight.
“With a lot of AI tools, it can feel intimidating on the backend,” Harris said. “With Flip, it doesn’t feel like that. I’m not afraid to touch it.”
Turning Down the Heat on High-Volume Calls
Today, Flip automates 75% of Caraway’s inbound phone traffic across high-frequency, time-sensitive requests. These are the kind of calls that escalate quickly when they go unanswered.
Top automated intents include:
- Cancel Order – 80%+ automated
- WISMO (Where Is My Order) – 75%+ automated
- Start Return – 75%+ automated
- Delivery Missing – 70%+ automated
- Report Damage – 90%+ automated
“Those are the calls that get lost the fastest,” Waters said. “They’re simple, but if they sit unanswered, customers get heated. You guys help keep the volume and the simmer down.”
By automating routine requests end-to-end, Flip allows customers to resolve issues quickly – while preserving context when escalation is needed.
Set It & Forget It
As the partnership evolved, Flip became something rare in customer support technology: uneventful.
“Flip is honestly one of our favorite tools because we don’t have to babysit it,” Harris said.
“With AI, the expectation is usually that you need someone dedicated to managing it,” she added. “That hasn’t been our experience at all.”
In practice, that meant consistency – the confidence that the phone channel would run smoothly without pulling focus away from higher-impact work.
The consistency showed up clearly in the numbers. Over the last 30 days alone:
- Over 4,000 inbound calls
- 75% fully automated
- 95%+ intent coverage
- 85%+ caller engagement
- 80%+ account match rate
During peak season, the impact was even more pronounced. Caraway handled more than 5,000 inbound calls in December, with roughly 74% resolved end to end through Flip.
When asked what would break if Flip suddenly wasn’t there, the answer was immediate.
“My mind,” said Gurd.
Harris described what would follow: a surge of unresolved issues in Caraway’s inbox.
Order Up!
For Caraway, Flip isn’t just automation. It’s infrastructure that protects the customer experience, making sure the phone channel stays calm, reliable, and intentional.
“The biggest thing Flip gives us is consistency,” Gurd said. “As volume grows, the experience stays the same.”
In a channel that often boils over, Caraway took a different approach.
“Ensuring consistency in the process customers go through is key for us, and you naturally lose that ability once you get too many cooks in the kitchen,” Nancy says.
By handling routine phone requests while preserving visibility, Flip keeps the kitchen running, letting Caraway’s CX team focus on the moments that matter most.
