Paper Culture uses 9 AI bots to automate e-commerce support during seasonal fluctuations

• Paper Culture is a B Corp stationery brand that plants a tree for every order and uses 100% recycled paper
• Their eco-friendly mission makes customers expect personal, top-notch support
• The challenge was handling holiday rushes, repeat “where’s my order?” questions, and detailed design or sustainability inquiries without losing their personal touch

Meet Paper Culture: More than just pretty paper

At its heart, Paper Culture is an e-commerce shop for beautiful, eco-friendly stationery and personalized gifts. Think custom holiday cards, wedding invitations, and photo books that don’t wreck the planet. People who shop there care about good design, but they also really care about the company’s mission. For every order, a tree gets planted. It’s a core part of who they are.

When growth creates pressure

As more people discovered Paper Culture, the support team started feeling the squeeze. The problem with being a beloved brand is… well, everyone wants to talk to you. They were dealing with a few key headaches:

• The same questions, over and over. “Where’s my order?” “How long is shipping?” “Where do you print?” You know the drill. Answering these all day was eating up valuable time.
• The really specific stuff. Customers had detailed questions about custom designs, color matching, paper types, and, of course, the nitty-gritty of their eco-practices. These aren’t simple yes/no answers.
• The seasonal flood. When the holidays or wedding season hit, the support queue would just explode. 
• Staying on-brand. Every single reply, whether it was for a simple question or a complaint, needed to sound like Paper Culture – thoughtful, premium, and eco-conscious.
• Letting agents do what they do best. The team was getting bogged down by the easy, repetitive questions, which kept them from focusing on the customers who needed real, human help with trickier issues.

They built a team of AI helpers

Instead of trying to use one giant, know-it-all chatbot, Paper Culture got smart. They used eesel AI to create a team of specialists, each trained for a specific job.

First, they had to teach the bots. They plugged eesel AI straight into the company’s brain:

• Zendesk: By feeding the AI their existing help center articles, macros, and thousands of past customer conversations, it quickly learned how to talk like a Paper Culture pro.
• Google Drive: Hooking up their internal documents gave the bots access to all the detailed specs and policies that only the team would know.

With that knowledge locked in, they assembled their bot crew:

• The front-desk crew: A primary bot greets customers on their public chat, handling most of the general questions. For more sensitive situations, like a complaint, another specialized bot takes over to make sure the response is just right.
• The task specialists: To knock out the most common questions, they have bots dedicated to specific tasks. One is the “Where’s my order?” bot, and it works 24/7. Others are experts on design customizations and personalization options.
• The eco ambassador: They even have a bot that’s basically a sustainability expert, ready to answer any and all questions about their tree-planting program and recycled materials. Another one focuses on answering questions from potential customers to help them make a purchase.
• The agent’s sidekick: My personal favorite is the internal “Copilot” bot they built for their human agents. It uses eesel AI’s Copilot to help draft responses, summarize long ticket threads, and pull up information in a flash, letting the agents solve complex problems faster. They’ve also got a bot just for internal team questions.

The cool part is how they all work together using eesel AI Actions. The main bot on the website can quickly “consult” the order status bot or the eco-bot to pull in the exact info it needs and deliver one clean answer. If a question is too tough for AI, the system automatically figures out which human agent is the right person for the job and assigns the ticket. The Copilot even helps keep things tidy by adding summary notes to tickets so everyone on the team stays in the loop.

Now, seasonal fluctuations of holidays and other events no longer create a stressful workload for their agents.

Did it actually work? (Spoiler: yes)

By building out this team of AI specialists, Paper Culture completely changed its support game.

The specialized bots for order status, design edits, and eco-facts took a huge load of repetitive questions off the team’s plate. This freed up the human agents to focus on customers with more complicated needs.

Customers could now get answers to their most common questions instantly, any time of day or night. And when the holiday rush hit, they didn’t have to scramble to hire and train temporary staff. The bots just handled the extra traffic smoothly.

The sustainability bot even turned standard support chats into moments where they could share their mission, which made customers feel even better about their purchase. And with their AI sidekick, the human agents were able to get back to customers with tricky issues way faster.

More than just a chatbot

Paper Culture’s story is a great reminder that AI in customer support isn’t just about deflecting tickets. When you’re thoughtful about it, you can build a system that helps your customers, empowers your team, and actually makes your brand stronger. They found a way to grow without losing the personal touch that made people fall in love with them in the first place.

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