Case study · 01
Cut 30% overhead during COVID by rebuilding the support stack. $480K/year saved, ongoing, and the systems stayed.
Technical Project Manager at Avocado Green Brands, Los Angeles. April 2019 – August 2020. The CX and returns infrastructure I inherited was held together with patches. I rebuilt it during COVID.
The returns side was running on Airtable, built piece by piece with no workflow planning, and it was hitting database limits. Budget was tight. We had to cancel the contract.
The CX side was understaffed even after hiring more people. By the early COVID months, the returns-escalation backlog had climbed past 5,000 tickets — product changes and an operational hiccup had compounded into a queue the team couldn’t dig out of.
The IVR routed calls badly. The Zendesk instance was misconfigured for the data we actually needed to pull from it.
Three separate problems, one underlying pattern: the support stack had been built reactively, never designed.
Returns ticketing
Interviewed every stakeholder. Process-flowed and diagrammed every step and pain point. Stood up a temporary system in Google Sheets to keep the team running while the Airtable contract wound down. Then negotiated with stakeholders and upper management to design the permanent ticketing system in-house, in Jira. Two quarters end to end.
Backlog clear-out
I dropped into the queue. Answered CX emails in Zendesk myself while taking over the administrative role of the platform. Worked across Marketing, Factory Operations, Product, and the C-Suite to build the rules and auto-responses that could close cases at scale instead of one by one.
A few of the automations that did the heavy lifting:
- Shipping-delay tickets auto-closed when carrier information confirmed delivery.
- Aged tickets closed with marketing copy and advance notices sent via Mailchimp.
- Keyword routing for warranty vs. damage so the right team got the ticket first.
IVR
Sat with the SMEs, mapped every response option, and redesigned the call-routing flow end to end.
- $480,000/year in saved overhead. Ongoing reduction in headcount plus cut spend on consulting and technical add-on services once the Zendesk rebuild was self-sufficient.
- 30% overhead reduction during a COVID-era operating period.
- CX headcount from ~40 to 28. Twelve roles dissolved into the automations.
- 5,000+ ticket backlog cleared and stayed cleared after the rules went live.
- Returns ticketing migrated off the failing Airtable instance to an in-house Jira build in two quarters.
- CCPA-compliant rebuild of CX and factory team tooling alongside the operational work.
- Hardware deployment projects delivered under budget, 25% ahead of schedule.
After I left, the systems stayed.
The biggest thing I would change is the temporary Google Sheets system. I should have pushed back on it harder. It never made sense as a real workflow, and it caused too much friction while we waited for the in-house Jira build to come together. Big regret.
The lesson I carried forward: lead with the why and what we’re actually trying to solve, rather than accepting solutions handed down. As I developed my negotiation skills in the years that followed, I learned to manage up better — to interrupt the bad path earlier, not just patch around it.
- Zendesk
- Admin rebuild, automation rules, reporting infrastructure.
- Jira
- In-house returns ticketing replacement.
- Mailchimp
- Automated advance-notice sends to aged-ticket cohorts.
- Google Sheets
- Interim returns-tracking system during the Airtable wind-down.
- IVR
- Call-routing reconfigured end to end with SMEs.