Sub-20 percent SLAs. Agents stretched thin, morale tanking. And customer reviews piling up with complaints that no one could reach support. For multi-brand ecommerce retailer Aterian, juggling a dozen Amazon accounts alongside Shopify and Walmart, each on different platforms, the chaos was real.
Dan Yawitz, Head of Technology at Aterian, and his team faced a crossroads: either keep patching together fractured legacy systems or take a step toward consolidation and automation. With fragmented tools, endless tabs, and SOPs scattered across platforms, the experience for agents and customers was slipping fast, Yawitz told CX Today in an interview. Agent morale was low, response times were even lower, and a seasonal sales rush was looming.
Fast forward a year, and the transformation is striking. By centralizing emails, chats and phone calls into one unified platform and layering in AI-driven tools to speed up repetitive tasks, SLAs have soared past 90 percent. Handle times have dropped 25 percent, and agents are happier. Even phone support, which had been largely paused, is back online. None of it came at the expense of headcount.
How did Aterian, which counts Squatty Potty among its brands, turn things around?
The Breaking Point: When Fragmentation Becomes Crisis
The fork in the road came when poor employee experience began affecting customer service, Yawitz said.
“We knew we had a problem. Agents were burning out… and it was starting to bleed into our customers’ experience. We were starting to get reviews that said, ‘I needed a replacement for this item, but I couldn't get customer service on the phone.’ That's when we said, here's the reason we need to make a change.”
Aterian’s CX ecosystem was fractured. Some replies were handled in Genesys, others in Zendesk, and phone support ran through a dialpad. SOPs were scattered across spreadsheets and manuals, forcing agents to juggle endless tabs.
“Our reply systems were fragmented… People were logging into a million tabs, tracking their SOPs and all of these,” Yawitz said.
Aterian put out a request for proposals (RFP) to vendors to help consolidate and automate its customer service operations.
“We needed to make a one-stop shop. We also wanted the ability to develop on it. Because my tech team likes getting hands-on,” Yawitz explained. “We like building things in-house.”
Aterian selected Genesys because it could consolidate email, chat and phone interactions, and give Yawitz’s team that flexibility to build.
“They had a built-in cloud platform that could be extensible and let us not only build things within their ecosystem, but also had enough open APIs that… we could carry things over.”
Aterian signed the deal in October 2023 and following a four-month implementation period, it introduced the new system in February 2024, which was the peak season for sales of its biggest product, dehumidifiers. That schedule was timed carefully to avoid disruptions, Yawitz said.
“We don't make any big changes during peak, because everyone is just scrambling to keep up with the volume.”
The Reality Check: We Still Had a Fragmentation Problem
Early wins were promising, Yawitz said.
“We got to the season, and we saw improvements like SLAs went from 20s up to 50s and 60s, which is good.”
But the team quickly realized that fragmentation persisted, especially around order lookups, SOP access, and redundant safety flows.
During the subsequent low season, Aterian’s tech team held a series of shadowing sessions with service employees to understand the pain points in their workflows. The company doesn’t have a dedicated contact center, as its CX teams work remotely.
“So we need to make sure that people aren't suffering in silence. We need to make sure that they can get connected with other people, like me, who can build and change processes for them,” Yawitz said.
Aterian then started rolling out a series of adjustments.
Laying the Foundation with Early Wins
The first breakthrough came from listening to agents explain how long it took to retrieve an order. Lookups often took minutes, and information from email threads, manuals, and SOPs was scattered—forcing context switching that slowed every interaction.
“That's an easy win for us,” Yawitz said.
Yawitz’s team reallocated database resources, built a lightweight API, and initially connected it to an internal Google chatbot called Fetch. Contact center agents could then instantly pull customer and order details with a simple copy and paste action to speed up the process.
The second phase brought that same capability directly into Genesys, so that agents could access it inside their existing workflows.
“They have a workflow that is built directly into the email portal that does four things for them.”
The workflow inside Genesys now summarizes emails and customer tone, drafts replies with suggested language and empathy cues, automatically extracts order and product information and populates external databases for wrap-up.
With order retrieval solved, the team turned to a bigger time sink: context switching. Long-running email threads, technical product issues, and documentation scattered across manuals and SOPs meant agents spent too much time piecing together history.
Yawitz’s team saw the opportunity to convert the text into a format searchable with AI tools.
“We took all of our knowledge documents, all of our product manuals, all of our SOPs. We ran them through a series of LLMs with good feedback loops, converted them into FAQs,” Yawitz said. The result was an app that delivers faster answers, with less tab-hopping.