ZendeskThe company
Lush makes fresh handmade cosmetics, vegetarian and against animal testing, and the Australian products are made in Sydney. Behind the shops is a small Tech Services team that supports more than 30 retail stores, manufacturing, head office and distribution across Australia and New Zealand, running its helpdesk in Zendesk. Its customers are Lush's own staff.
The problem
An internal IT desk for retail sees the same tickets in cycles: a point of sale running slowly, a screen that has gone blank again, a password changed on the manager's laptop, a new seasonal range that will not load. The fixes are known and mostly written down in earlier tickets, but a small team still writes each reply from scratch, and a ticket that just says "the printer is broken" needs three questions before anyone can start.
The team wanted the first reply ready when they opened a ticket, in their own warm voice rather than a corporate one, and they wanted the tickets that need judgment, complaints, personnel matters, security, kept away from any automatic answer.
How it runs
Lush Australia connected Zendesk to eesel in June 2026. eesel reads about 170 past tickets and about 30 guides the team uploaded. The agent's instructions describe the team's tone and where the line is between a draft and a note.
- Two triggers. A new incoming ticket gets a draft automatically, signed Tech Services. A teammate writing @eesel in an internal note gets a draft on request, signed with their own first name.
- The voice is a colleague's, not a bot's. "Hi" or "Hey" and a first name, conversational, the answer or next step first, a numbered list when there are steps, an emoji where it feels natural, and an offer to help further. Gender-neutral throughout.
- Vague tickets get questions, not guesses. What exactly is the issue, when did it start, what has already been tried. The draft also asks whether the fix being requested is what the person actually needs.
- Some tickets get a note instead of a draft. Complaints, personnel matters, security incidents and anything needing a human call are flagged in an internal note that says what eesel was unsure about, with no reply drafted.
- Gaps are written down. When a draft rests on something eesel could not confirm from its sources, an internal note beside it lists what is missing, so the person sending knows what to check. If it does not know, the draft says the team will look into it rather than inventing steps.
A month of work
Between 8 August and 8 September 2026 eesel worked on about 150 Zendesk tickets for Lush's Tech Services team. It wrote about 90 draft replies and left about 90 internal notes. Tickets arrive around the clock from stores in two countries, and the drafts are on the ticket when the team gets to it.