Answer most support tickets with a rules-driven AI workflow and a human fallback

Eric McNulty, who runs customer experience systems at Mercari US, built the marketplace's AI support flow on Zapier after off-the-shelf tools failed on hard cases. Mercari gets about 120,000 tickets a month. A master Zap of roughly 90 steps sorts each ticket by category, then sub-Zaps handle FAQs, routing and replies. Prompts, policies and wording live in Google Sheets, so the CX team can change them without engineers. If confidence is low or a step fails, the ticket goes back to a human. The system now sends first replies on about 97% of tickets and fully resolves around 47,000 a month. Zapier reports 3,000 hours saved monthly and CSAT up one point on a 5-point scale.